Memories of the Fall

The Blue Gate School is one of the rising stars of the Yin Eclipse sub-continent. In the last 30,000 years it has risen from a minor faction in the coastal trading hub of Blue Water City to the pre-eminent sect within that north-eastern region of our Great World, acting as the gateway for much of the wealth of alchemical and medicinal craft emerging from there. Despite being quite low in the overall rankings of sects from the Eastern Continent, its leaders have largely shown excellent acumen when seeking out political allies to the south and it has some small connection to the Lu clan of the central continent and to the Ha clan. It is likely these connections which have enabled it to thrive when other influences, such as the ill-fated Lin School, were unable to survive the recent turmoil in the region…

Excerpt – The Sects of the East

~By Seng Mo.

~ Jun Arai – Jade Willow Blessing Inn and Teahouse ~

Arai awoke from her pseudo-sleep to the sound of rain drumming on the tiled roof of the inn in the grey pre-dawn gloom. With a groan, she stretched her arms and legs, grimacing into her pillow, fighting the lingering stress of the previous day that lingered on for a few moments, pondering if she should in fact go back to sleep again.

She didn’t normally need to sleep for more than a few hours a week, few cultivators of any stripe did once you got to Qi Refinement and physical cultivators could go much longer without it than the average spiritual one. The problem she had now, though, was that overdrawing her mantra and playing with her perception of her stamina and her emotions to the degree she had the previous day was a dangerous and false economy to get into for too long. In this case, though, the sleep also helped counteract the copious amounts of alcohol she had consumed the previous evening.

She sighed and rolled over, staring up at the carved wooden ceiling above the bed, tracing the various dancing animals and listening to the rain, trying to ignore the humidity and the slight headache she had from the spirit wine.

“…”

She lay there like that for a few minutes, barely awake, until her stomach grumbled, reminding her that hunger was also still a thing if you pushed your body hard enough.

With a sigh, she sat up properly and stretched a second time, trying to ignore the dull ache in her side that lingered from the tetrid stalker’s blow. Focusing on her storage talisman, still around her neck, she pulled out a loose robe and put it on, then located her boots which lay on the floor near the bed, before checking that she looked vaguely presentable in the mirror.

Her dark brown, mostly straight hair was a bit tangled, but that was easy to fix. Her dark hazel eyes were a bit bloodshot, but that would also go away with some food, as would the slightly drawn expression she didn’t feel like banishing, courtesy of the after-effects of her overuse of her mantra.

After doing a few more stretches, and a fair bit of wincing because her ribs still hurt, she walked over to the window and peered out at the street outside.

Even with the early hour, people were already hustling along under umbrellas and cloaks, going about the start of their daily business or setting up the first market stalls. There were notably fewer wagons though, which implied they had gotten the teleportation circles up at least.

Taking a few deep breaths to clear her head she watched for a few minutes until the last vestiges of her headache had passed.

“Today is not a good day to be an astrologer,” she joked, patting the small good luck charm on the wall by the window before heading back into the room.

Going over to the table by the south-facing wall she found where the inn stored the incense for the room. Shoving three sticks in a bowl, she pulled out a picture scroll from her talisman – a simple painting of her mother, by her mother’s own hand – and put it on the stand in the middle of the table.

Stepping back, she bowed to the scroll three times. She then lit three candles and bowed again, pulled her robe up over her head so it was a hood that shadowed her face and pulled a white, origami chrysanthemum the size of a teacup out of her storage talisman to hold in her cupped hands.

“Dearest mother… Your blessing is still with me, it seems.”

It was a prayer she had said most days she was not stuck in a jungle valley somewhere since the day after their mother died.

“Sana is not here today. She is in Blue Water City, I think, or should have arrived there by now… so I will speak on her behalf as well. I survived another trip into the mountains. This time I had to bring bodies back out as well, three of them were flower sellers of all things: Ha Fenfang, Nen Shirong and Nen Hong. They were all good people – the same age as we were when we started out with the Pavilion. Even though I ended up with this responsibility… when I was trying to carrying them out… all I could see was my own face and Sana’s and…”

She trailed off, unable to finish that sentence.

“—All I could see were our faces, frozen, dead from yin qi poisoning, just like theirs… I wish the world was as nice and simple as it seemed all those years ago. When we played in the garden and you tried to teach us to paint flowers… We really had no destiny with painting, did we? At least Sana is okay at origami.”

“I—”

The words 'I really miss you', caught in her throat.

Her eyes prickled a bit and made her sniff. She shook her head and wiped away the dampness in her eyes.

“On your behalf, I, your daughter, thrice curse your wretched parents and uncles for their crime.”

Her words, half prayer, half curse, echoed softly in the room. The flames of the candles burning flickered and the smoke from the incense swirled.

“May they be haunted by the Eye of the Nameless Fate for what they did.”

Exhaling, she extinguished the three candles, saluted the altar and then bowed thrice more to it.

Her morning ritual done, she packed up the altar and stood in silence for a few moments with her eyes closed, finding her centre again and banishing the lingering feelings of grief and anger back to the little corner of her mind where they resided. Only when she was certain she no longer wanted to punch a wall did she open them again and give the room one last glance, before starting to plan the day ahead.

The first step on that path was in fact to change her robe, again. She was almost about to walk out the door wearing a knee-length loose gown that was deep azure with darker blue flowers and clouds on it, before it occurred to her that that might cause problems. This was Ha clan territory, firmly Ha clan territory, and while the Ha clan was technically a neutral force in these lands, it was a neutral force that didn’t really get on with the Hunter Bureau. Wandering around town openly carrying the token of a nine-star ranked Junior Official might get her marked as someone even less popular around these parts than an Azure Astral Authority supporter – a tax official from Blue Water City.

As such, she departed her room wearing a loose robe that was grey-purple with an orange trim, close enough to that of the colours and style of Ha clan that she would probably not get hassled by edgy farmers or people expecting a surprise audit for an early harvest.

…

“Morning Miss… Jun,” the maid at the main reception for the Jade Willow Blessing barely missed a beat trying to recall her name as she walked down the stairs to the ground floor.

“Morning, just about,” she replied back with a half-smile. “I don’t suppose you serve breakfast at this hour?”

“No… sorry,” the maid bowed apologetically. “There are some nice places just along the street though, old man Huanfei sells fried spirit fruit, the Green Moon Teahouse… Mrs Maimei’s stall… Bohai probably has fried fish from the night’s catch… ah… ”

The maid trailed off, realising, probably, that half those names would mean little to her as she was not a local.

“Its fine,” she said, waving a hand with a disarming smile, something about the woman’s disposition shifting a bit of her previous gloom. “If I see one of them I will be sure to let them know you recommended them.”

“Ah… thank you,” the maid bowed again, then frowned.

“Is there something else?” she asked.

“Uh… one moment, could you wait here?” the maid bowed again and scurried off.

“…”

Watching her leave, she shrugged and looked around the ‘teahouse’ area of the inn. It was not that full, just a few workers sitting around talking and sharing breakfast they had brought with them, presumably waiting for carts or instructions. There were a few other guests up and about, but nobody paid her any real mind. Anyone up at this hour was more preoccupied with their own circumstances she was sure.

“Ah, sorry about that!” the maid said, returning with a bearded young man who was rubbing sleep out of his eyes and pulling on some body armour marked with the seal of Jade Willow Village.

“Uh?” she looked at the militia guard curiously.

“You… are… ah… Jun Arai?” he asked, immediately perking up.

“I am,” she nodded, “how can I help you?”

“Was sent here to get you, got a scroll at the gate, left with the watch captain for a ‘Jun Arai’…” he said with a yawn, holding up an identification talisman for her so she could see that he was, in fact, a genuine village guard.

“They couldn’t send it here?” she asked, wondering what it was.

“—Tea?” the maid interjected politely.

“Yes. Please,” she nodded, as did the guard.

“Woulda made things… simpler,” the guard yawned again and adjusted his armour slightly as he put the talisman back on his belt. “Thought you would be staying at the Pavilion though.”

“The Pavilion was too chaotic,” she shrugged, accepting a cup of tea from the maid. “Sorry for the inconvenience. I hope you didn’t have to look too long to track me down?”

“There are not that many inns in this place,” the guard grinned, accepting his own cup. “I can’t complain though, this got me off running errands for the boss in this fates-accursed rain for a few hours, and better company than I am usually stuck with!”

The maid gave the guard a kick behind the counter.

“Ouch! It’s true, Caimei!” the guard muttered.

“If every guard slacked off like you did, Caifan, it would be a wonder we still had a chicken in the town,” the maid remarked with a friendly scowl. “And that’s Aunt Caimei to you!”

“But you’re only six years older—”

“So, do I have to go to the village militia compound?” she asked, getting the conversation back on track and sipping her tea.

“Ahem…Yeah,” guardsman Caifan coughed, ignoring Caimei’s glare and turning back to her with an apologetic shrug. “That scroll was super fancy, like the fanciest thing I’ve seen since that cunt Li came here.”

“Elder Li makes friends widely,” she remarked, which got a snort from Caifan, as well as some laughs from a small group of labourers sitting nearby who happened to overhear her comment.

…

In the end, she finished her cup of tea before following Caifan out into the rain-drenched streets. Rather than go to the gate she had last gone to, they actually headed towards the western side of the town, eventually arriving at a larger walled compound after a few minutes of dodging umbrellas and the odd cart on the streets.

“There you are, you bastard!” a guard yelled at Caifan, almost as soon as they got through the compound’s main gate. “What did you have to do, seduce her or something?”

“…”

Twirling her umbrella in her hand so it scattered rain drops widely, she scowled at the guard who had heckled them.

“That’s Corporal bastard to you, Ha Wang!” Caifan retorted back, before adding to her. “Don’t mind him, he’s just grumpy he had to spit into carts all night in this rain.”

“Right…” she murmured drolly.

“This way, by this point the captain almost certainly has the thing, fancy as it was,” Caifan went on, waving for her to follow him across the muddy courtyard to the largest building.

“Ah, there you are, Caifan. I thought you had gotten lost on the path of life again… or in the tea house,” the guard standing by the entrance scowled, before looking at her “and who is this?”

“I’m here for a scroll,” she replied politely.

“Ah, that thing…” the guard grunted. “Well, off with the hat, let’s see you – it left a description an’ all.”

“Can we not go inside?” she asked with a glance upwards at the steadily falling rain.

“Should have shown up here like a respectful person five hours ago when it was delivered,” the guard grunted, pulling out a jade seal.

“…”

Biting back a sigh, that she noted was mirrored by Caifan, she stored her broad hat and tilted the umbrella back.

“You are Jun Arai? From West Flower Picking Town?” the guard asked as a shimmering image of her, looking a bit smarter than she did currently, appeared out of a jade in his hand.

“Yes, I am Jun Arai, of the West Flower Picking Hunter Pavilion,” she confirmed for the array in the jade, trying to ensure the umbrella kept away the worst of the rain.

All three of them watched as it glowed a bright green and the guard stashed it away with a sigh.

“Good show, Bai, now you got the nine-star rank Hunter remembering you stood her in the rain to take her picture,” Caifan grunted.

“Get a lot of people pretending to be others out here?” she asked, somewhat curious.

“We got a sect in the town, don’t we?” the guard grumbled, waving for her to go on through. “Don’t keep the captain waiting.”

Nodding, she followed Caifan through the large archway and into the hall, storing away the umbrella as she went. Caifan just shook out his cloak, not caring about the splashing water, then led her down the hall, through another door and up some stairs into a well-lit barrack room where a bunch of other guards were sitting around a table playing a dice game.

“This the senior Hunter you were sent to find?” one of the youngest guards asked Caifan, eyeing her dubiously.

“With observational skills like that, is it any wonder you’re losing talismans?” one of the other guards at the table, a fellow with a very shady beard, snickered.

Caifan just rolled his eyes and led her across the room and banged on the door at the far end. A moment later an older man with a military beard and a tired look on his face opened the door and peered out.

“Jun Arai is here, Sir,” Caifan said, saluting.

“Ah, Corporal Cai… were you not meant to be here a few hours ago?” the captain said, looking her over.

“It’s crazier than a sect trial out there, Sir,” Caifan said, entirely straight-faced and still standing to attention. “I had to search the whole town for her.”

“…”

The captain stared at him, then her, then sighed. “Miss Jun was it? Come on in then.”

She nodded politely to the other guards who were, she noted with an inward sigh, all looking at parts of her that were not her face, courtesy of her robe being slightly soaked, and went through into the captain’s office.

“Jun Arai, nine-star ranked Hunter from West Flower Picking Town,” she introduced herself with a respectful, clasped hand gesture after Caifan had closed the door behind them.

“Uhuh,” the captain said noncommittally, not returning a name – not that she had really expected him to do so.

“Quite a mess out there,” she added politely. “Rain from the east makes trouble for everyone when it’s not expected.”

“That’s the heavens’ honest truth,” the captain grumbled, pulling open a drawer and retrieving a scroll that was sealed at both ends and held a jade talisman on it, tossing it to her.

He made his way back around the desk and sat down as she inspected it. There turned out to be three separate seals on it – that of the Governor of West Flower Picking Town, Ha Feirong, the Ha clan itself and then the personal seal of the Governor, but as an inner disciple of the Blue Gate School.

-Well, this is either a designated mission or a summons for something, she thought glumly, unsealing it.

Looking at the contents, she sighed softly. Inside, all the scroll said was: ‘Report to the local Hunter Pavilion of Jade Willow Village – instructions there. Designated request for Jun Xiuying. Authority of West Flower Picking Governor – Ha Feirong.’

“By your reaction, I assume it’s not a good mission?” the captain remarked, pouring himself a cup of wine.

“All it says is that they will tell me what’s what at the local Pavilion,” she replied. “Do I have to acknowledge that I’ve received it somewhere?”

“Oh, yeah, Corporal Wu will take care of that,” the captain said with a wave of dismissal.

She saluted politely again then left the room, closing the door behind her as the captain started to read something on a paper report, sipping his wine.

“You finished quickly,” Caifan remarked, glancing over at her from the table, his bad innuendo getting various crude laughs from the others.

“I have to acknowledge receipt of this apparently,” she said, holding up the scroll with her best apologetic smile. “The captain said a Corporal Wu would be able to sort it out?”

“Faugh,” a balding man, with a rather inadvisable moustache that made him look like a gangster, shook his head and stood up. “I fold. This will take me a while.”

She made to come with him, but he just waved for her to sit down and went off to the other office. Presumably he just had to fill in a form on their loci link here, much as she had done in the Hunter Pavilion earlier, and probably send a message transmission to the Ha clan.

“Care to join in?” one of the guards asked, pointing to an empty spot at the table beside him. “Nice to have a bit o’ beauty in the game.”

“…”

“I’d not be very lucky company today,” she chuckled. “Been around too much yin qi.”

That was a good reason, but actually the main reason was that she just had no idea what game they were playing.

“Aye, Tan at the gate said a beauty came through with a bad body in a cart all wrapped up with luss cloth – monster attack?” the guard sporting the very dubious beard asked.

-Nothing escapes notice, after all, she reflected to herself.

“Probably not. I found him on another mission, up above the ginseng fields south-east of the town,” she explained, walking over to the table.

“Uggh, bad place, that,” the oldest-looking guard nodded, drawing on his pipe. “Not a lot of folks like going there this last season or two.”

“Aye,” Caifan agreed as the others all nodded.

“I saw harvest marks for last season on my way down,” she noted.

“Aye, would be a few, I guess,” the dubious beard guard nodded, putting down his hand. “Likely from before that tetrid male cut up Fei Moon and Bolai villages.”

“That scroll o’ yours better not be about another one of them that’s scuttled out from under some rock or hole exposed by a landslide,” the one who had asked her to sit beside him added with a grimace.

“Please say not,” Caifan agreed with a shudder.

“Unlikely,” she replied. “That kind of thing goes to the Beast Cadre.”

-Although it does put some context on my own encounter with them… so Jade Willow has a recent history with tetrids where they shouldn’t be? she mused.

“—All it says is that they will tell me what’s what at the local Pavilion,” she added.

“Maybe some minor noble from West Flower Picking Town wants a new potted ginseng… or one of those glowing orchids for their kid,” the older guard suggested, puffing on his pipe while he eyed his own cards dubiously.

“More likely some rich farmer’s kid has gotten lost looking for a special herb or something,” Caifan said with a laugh.

She nodded in agreement at that – that was the most likely outcome, sadly, especially given it was already a major part of why she was out here.

“Let’s hope for a potted plant,” she said with a wry smile. “That at least will pay well.”

“Too true, too true,” shady moustache agreed.

“Anyway,” she frowned, walking around the table. “What was this about landslides? I saw a few on my way down but none of them were marked.”

“Ah, that’s not surprising,” the pipe-smoking guard replied, tapping out his pipe as the others all nodded. “Especially if you came down them valleys over the escarpment – nobody was interested in going there after the tetrid attacks and the whole forest was flooded out in the wet season earlier in the year. It almost eliminated the ginseng fields over there.”

“Oh, so they just marked those valleys off and decided to leave it for a few seasons?” she mused, understanding now.

“Yep, pretty much,” the inadvisably-bearded guard nodded.

“You sure you don’t want in? Wu is gonna be a while,” Caifan added.

“Unless you’re going to play ‘Gu Seizes the Heavens,’ I’m afraid not,” she chuckled.

“Eh, we play that first night of the week, but whatever – can do,” the pipe-smoking guard said with a hoarse laugh.

“…”

She was tempted to still say no, but now having openly admitted that there was a card game she did know…

Sighing, she sat down, trying not to notice the glints in their eyes. Not next to the one who had originally asked her, but next to Caifan, much to the amusement of the others, as they pulled out a deck of cards and various tokens. The variant they were playing had four sides: Sage, Warlord, Bandit and Beast. She picked Sage, because that was what she normally played with her sister and a few other friends, and watched as they dealt out the cards.

“Anything else weird going on locally?” she asked as she picked her cards and then sighed as she found herself staring at a hand that only a mother could love, or call auspicious.

“Nothing more than the usual if you’re thinking about jobs,” the pipe-smoking guard, who had introduced himself now as Yan, replied. “Just people complaining about no opportunities and poor harvest, and today, this heaven-accursed piss that is falling down.”

“Other than that tetrid matter a while back, no monster attacks or anything,” shady moustache, who was called Qin, agreed. “Just the local sect and the Pavilion playing silly buggers with the village making do while the Ha and Deng clans circle like cats in an alley.”

“Still, I am surprised a tetrid walked all the way out here,” she observed as she watched them start to play their hands. “Usually they don’t come this close to civilisation. They are not stupid by any means, especially once they get nests going.”

“Aye, was right weird. It was a solitary male, big un – probably close to Immortal realm as well,” the guard with the inadvisable beard, Fuhao, said with a grimace.

-Was it now… she mused, recalling the size of the one that had jumped her…

“Went through two villages, injured quite a few experts before they put it down. They looked for where it came from, but if anyone found anything, they never let on,” Caifan added.

“Still makes folks nervous to go up that side,” Yan, playing ‘Warlord’, agreed.

“Can’t blame em. It’s one thing to worry about stuff up there, but if it’s gonna follow you home at fates know what realm…” Qin agreed.

“And it wasn’t put in as a high priority request?” she asked, puzzled by that.

“Maybe it was, probably to Blue Water City, or maybe some elite from the Ha clan just came on their own and looked,” Fuhao said, sitting back in his chair and staring at his own cards with a scowl.

They played a full round, which she managed to come second in, much to the amusement of the guards. The third round she also let herself come second, and didn’t lose any talismans, by which time Corporal Wu returned, informing her that all was good. Donating half her ‘winnings’ – which only amounted to ten iron talismans anyway – to their drinking money, because it never hurt to make guards like you, she excused herself from the table and thanked them for their hospitality.

Caifan showed her back out, into the misty dawn light, and sent her off with a cheery wave. Ten minutes later saw her sitting, waiting, at an early morning stall, twirling her umbrella slowly in the rain as an old man finished frying some pieces of a local spirit fruit in batter.

“Even the birds are complaining about the weather,” she chuckled, pointing to a group of bright plumed fowl who were sheltering under a bench exuding a certain degree of vexed intent.

“That is the heavens-sanctioned truth,” the stall vendor sighed in agreement, handing her the bag of tasty fried fruit.

Paying him a few bronze talismans, she set off, bag under arm, avoiding the puddles as she made her way back towards the Pavilion. On the way past, she banged on the door of the communal ancestral temple and left a note to the acolytes there, explaining that there was a body in the Hunter Pavilion’s secure storage that required auspicious rites and purification. She had intended to do it last night, but the temple had been shut and a helpful merchant had informed her that the acolytes were all out in the fields doing that side of their job, saying prayers for good fortune over the harvest.

The Hunter Pavilion was just as busy at this hour as it had been when she left it the previous day… maybe ten hours earlier. A third of the outer court was now cordoned off and had been converted into temporary teleportation circles beside which four austere figures in indigo-blue robes were arguing over paperwork with several local Pavilion bureaucrats and a man in the robes of the Jade Willow Sect – all of them sheltered by several functionaries holding umbrellas.

Even in the rain she could feel the faint oppression off the blue-robed figures and make out the nine slashes of silver on their attire. Nine-star ranked bureau officials – requisition elders from Blue Water City’s provincial Hunter Bureau offices in all likelihood. All of them would be Chosen Immortals as well. She bowed politely in their direction, just like everyone else as they entered and exited the plaza around the Pavilion, then hurriedly made her way to where she needed to go – the Pavilion’s Mission Hall.

On the way into the Mission Hall, which was on the far side from the teleportation circles, she cast an eye across their notice board, just in case anything stood out.

Mostly it was a bunch of very recent, urgent and quite well-paying requests for help bringing in the harvest, which were being grabbed as fast as they could be provided by several hovering groups of labourers and village experts. Beyond that, it seemed to be a bad season for harvesting yin ginseng, the local speciality crop in the valleys above here, and there were a few warnings about new blood ling trees being spotted higher up. That she made a note of – there was even a clearance request to get rid of one, which was certainly not going to be popular. A glance at the date told her it had been up there for two months.

-That must be making an administrative elder somewhere around here weep for this pavilion’s mandated task completion record for the season, she reflected dryly as she headed on, up the steps into the hall.

Entering the Mission Hall, she bowed politely to the elder keeping a watchful eye over things and made her way through it, ignoring the hustle and bustle to reach the back where she was let into the inner hall without any shenanigans thanks to her talisman. Here, mercifully, it was much quieter – just a few clerks poring over a list of documents on a large table and a grey-haired woman in a blue and bronze robe standing staring at a large map on the wall as if it had insulted her nine generations.

Making her way over to the clerks by the table, she bowed politely.

“Excuse me, I am Hunter Jun Arai. I am here to see about this?” she pulled out the scroll and offered it to the most senior-ranked one.

“Truly, rain comes from the east,” a clerk said with a sigh, taking the scroll and opening it, skimming it, then just tossing it on the table. “Please wait here. I will call Senior Clerk Bai.”

She didn’t have to wait long before a rather harried-looking, scholarly clerk wearing the robes of a four-star ranked official appeared and saluted her politely.

“Ah! Welcome, Miss… Ha? I am Senior Clerk Bai, Bai Huan Gi, but please just call me Clerk Bai. Everyone else does,” the clerk introduced himself.

“Greetings, Senior Clerk Bai,” she saluted him back politely. “I am here about a number of missions, it seems, not just that one… and I am not with the Ha clan, I am just dressing diplomatically… It would be a bad day to be mistaken as a tax official.”

“It is that time of year,” he agreed with a wry chuckle, gesturing for her to take a seat at one of the tables. “Would you like some tea? Refreshments? Breakfast?”

“I had something on the way here, thank you, but some tea would be nice,” she replied.

“How was the journey?” Clerk Bai asked politely as he shuffled various pieces of paper away and got out a few different jade talismans.

“Given I came over the mountains, on another mission, about what you might expect,” she said with a wry smile. “The rain was an unwelcome conclusion to that trip. I would have come here yesterday, but it was already very late and the entire place was a frantic mess with all those people rushing around for the harvest.”

“It still is,” Clerk Bai sighed. “So, apart from the obvious one, what missions are you here for?”

She pulled out her jade scrip and sent some qi into it, linking it to her talisman. “There is a clearance request to teach a bunch of people how to gather herbs – that will be very popular now, I am sure. One about a Duo Li’s lotus infestation which is more complicated than it first seemed, another to track down a bunch of missing cultivators in the Red Pit, which is even worse, and two to deal with mutated plants on a massif about two miles north of the village?”

“Ah, the entire shit list… although I am not familiar with the one regarding the Red Pit…” Clerk Bai said with another sigh. “And that one is certainly another one to go right at the top of that pile, but an elder will be here to talk about that soon. Honestly, I am surprised someone of your rank is out here doing half of these.”

“You know how rank is out here,” she said with a wan smile, not needing to ask which mission the elder would be coming to talk about.

“Good on paper, but halved in the eyes of those from afar,” Clerk Bai said with a knowing look.

That was a very accurate summation. She was a nine-star ranked Herb Hunter, technically at the peak of that promotion track, which was a stellar achievement for her eighteen years of age – until you factored in that the local politics had expedited the removal of the cultivation realm requirement on ranking up in these regional Pavilions in recent times.

It remained for elders and senior civil employees of the various Civil Bureaus though, so there was effectively a two-tier rank track now. Juniors went back to three-star when they were promoted to full official and thus had to have a cultivation to match their rank thereafter. Clerk Bai was thus a four-star ranked official, at Soul Foundation – her junior still, but only barely given he had parity of rank with an eight-star junior official.

“It does bring some opportunities,” she conceded.

“Out here, more problems too,” Clerk Bai added with a grimace. “We have struggled to retain anyone over five-star rank with any kind of cultivation parity since the ‘Three Schools Conflict’.”

“I take it that is why I am here doing all these clearance requests,” she mused, looking around the room again.

“Pretty much,” Clerk Bai agreed. “Anyone with prospects who can get to Nascent Soul by a reasonable age is already in a sect or snapped up by a local clan as a guest member. They work for us, but they are all guest officials, and so they take what is good, and leave the difficult things by and large until politics shuffles the deck—”

“—and those requests land somewhere like our West Flower Picking Pavilion as someone else’s problem,” she finished for him, being rather familiar with that scenario.

“I have to assume you have the same problems we do, though?” she asked searchingly. “I met a few… characters last night.”

“I think I can guess the ones you mean,” Clerk Bai replied with a look that was both amused and a bit frustrated.

“You can say it…” she chuckled.

“True, but it is not easy. In all honesty, without the generous patronage of the Ha clan and the Jade Willow Sect we would not even be as effective as we are,” Clerk Bai sighed, accepting a cup of tea from a serving maid who had materialised with a tray holding two cups, a teapot and some pastry rolls stuffed with spirit fruit.

She accepted the proffered cup and took a sip, refraining from commenting that that very patronage was in fact part of the problem.

Clerk Bai took a large sip of his tea, then sighed before continuing to speak. “The big politics of rivalry is a blight us little folks must live with. We have manpower now, but nobody who rises high here gets promoted easily in Blue Water City, given where we are.”

“It’s the same in West Flower Picking,” she agreed diplomatically. “Anyone with clan ties that do not align with the Azure Astral Authority’s connections to the Bureau and prospects languishes.”

-And as a result Hunters like me end up with mission lists like this. All because clans like the Ha won’t risk their real elites for the benefit of others.

“—And instead, the Bureau in Blue Water City is turning towards the east, to Xah Liji city,” Clerk Bai muttered before looking at her again and stopping to sip his tea, looking a bit embarrassed…

He had clearly connected her slightly more tanned appearance, brown hair and dark eyes to her mother’s ancestry with the Ruan clan of the Easten continent – of which Xah Liji was the gateway city.

-I should not have corrected him earlier, she thought wryly, smoothing the sleeve of her robe.

“Ahem… I did not mean to insinuate that…” Clerk Bai said with an awkward cough.

“Please,” she waved a hand in polite dismissal. “Not everyone who comes from the east gets on well with those clans. Let us not talk of them.”

Clerk Bai nodded and ate one of the rolls that had come with the tea – to hide his embarrassment she guessed.

She didn’t mind it – her looks were a vestige of her mother, not something she would let the Ruan clan take any ownership of in her mind. She sipped her tea in silence and waited for the clerk to stop shuffling his papers.

“If I might ask,” Clerk Bai said slowly, after pouring them both another cup of tea and pulling up a sheet of paper, “—the teaching request here and discussion around it states that you and your uh… sister would both be coming here? The request did specify a whole team.”

“Ah,” she pursed her lips and nodded, took a scroll and a paper letter from her jade storage talisman and passed it to him. “My sister, Sana, was requested personally for a mission by Young Lady Ling, of the Ling family in Blue Water City – she sends her deepest apologies.”

“Oh,” Clerk Bai read the short letter, which was basically a waiver from the Ling clan saying as much, with a vexed look on his face. “That is unfortunate… The payment was…”

“It is not ideal,” she agreed, sipping her tea.

The original request had asked for a ‘team’ which was likely why it got kicked about for so long. There were not many ‘teams’ of high-ranked Hunters who would bother with such a request without being told to do it. They had landed it, she was sure, because the two of them had cut their teeth on missions in the lower valleys around here when they were first starting out. The Ha clan were basically the rulers of West Flower Picking Town and ensured that all the training afforded to the up and coming prospects in the town’s Hunter Pavilion built connections and expertise in their territory.

“How come this isn’t being handled locally?” she asked, moving the topic on.

“How long is a piece of yarn?” Clerk Bai sighed. “The culmination of various disagreements between a new pavilion elder, Elder Li, the village leadership and the Jade Willow Sect basically. As a result, the Village Authority actually filed this in Blue Water City.”

“Hoping to get someone neutral?” she asked, by way of a guess. “In any case unfortunately the payment was agreed. It is a clearance mission given to West Flower Picking, so the terms are sadly non-negotiable, although I understand your own concerns.”

She did; likely someone local had gotten tired of their request being ignored and used a bit of influence to get it pushed up to a ‘clearance’ request – which would have to be completed by the Pavilion it was registered with or they would see a penalty and higher taxes the following year. Failing too many also caused problems for everyone in that Pavilion’s mission record – among other things. Now it had somewhat backfired on them because rather than a whole team they just got her.

“That said, both of us have been admirably screwed over by the season,” she conceded.

“So it seems,” Clerk Bai agreed, taking a rather aggressive sip of his tea, clearly still unhappy. He clearly knew the deal, though, so much of this was probably theatre in the aim of getting the mission bumped down to a normal one again with her ‘blessing’.

It wasn’t even that much money – they were offering fifty spirit stones, which included the budget for the teaching, so really it would be closer to ten or fifteen after you factored in the sheer volume of ward stones to be used by twenty people trying to catch ginseng for the first time. That amount made…

-The numbers have dropped because of the harvest, she realised with a vexed sigh of her own. They budgeted it cheaply and now they are giving away too many spirit stones…

The quantity they were pinching over, though, made a bit of a mockery of the whole thing. It was a lot of money to the average villager – but it was about what her meek yin ginseng was worth. The annual turnover of this Pavilion was likely a few thousand pure spirit stones after expenses, tithes and taxes.

“Look,” she said, taking another sip of the tea, “—everyone is pushed and this has been a bad season so far. Too much politics going around for everyone.”

“True, true,” Clerk Bai agreed, pouring himself more tea. “However, the numbers we can provide to be taught have also dropped…”

-As expected.

“The request said we… I would be teaching a group of twenty?” she asked probingly.

“Ah, yes… however…” Clerk Bai shifted a bit in his seat.

“However?” she pushed.

“The harvest,” Clerk Bai replied apologetically. “Most of those who were due to go with you, have been called away by their families or have taken the jobs on the board today. We were wondering if you would be willing to wait on that request until the harvest has been brought in?”

“…”

She considered it. The timing could work… She could go clear up the other missions first, then recover the bodies of the three flower sellers, return to the Red Pit and finish confirming that the cultivators she was after were plant fodder in all likelihood, then come back do the teaching and have all of them verified as completed in Jade Willow Village.

“The timings could work,” she mused, “but I have no idea what this new request entails. The issue is that the teaching request is designated as a clearance mission for this month. I will need to speak to West Flower Picking Pavilion, and probably Blue Water City.”

“Ah…” Clerk Bai sighed deeply.

“You didn’t do that to try to push it through before the harvest?” she said, sitting back with a sigh of her own. “Did you?”

“No… We… well, the new elder did it,” Clerk Bai explained with a further vexed sigh.

“New elder?” she frowned, because this ‘new’ Elder Li seemed to be cropping up a lot now, and the last thing she wanted was to get involved in the politics of the upper end of different Pavilions.

“Elder Ha Li Wei was assigned here some months ago. He is a five-star ranked official and former Herb Hunter, now a disciple of the Blue Gate School who actually has…”

“—a foundation to match his rank?” she said drily – it made sense if he was an elder.

“Yes,” Clerk Bai acknowledged, looking a bit frustrated.

“How does he come to be an elder in this Pavilion though?” she felt compelled to ask because with that backing it was a dead-end track, and he was already a disciple of the Blue Gate School, unless…“It’s Ha clan territory and the Bureau is deliberately not sending capable people now?”

“You read it clearly,” Clerk Bai agreed, pouring himself a fourth cup of tea. “The Bureau gave up sending people from the city just after the ‘Three Schools Conflict’ thirty years ago, and now, these last few years, we are just stuck with nobody really getting promoted past five-star rank in the yearly evaluations.”

“What about the other elders?” she asked, dredging through her memories. “Isn’t there an Elder Han Fei Sung who was at the silver eight-star rank?”

“Old Elder Fei was injured during a spate of attacks by a tetrid stalker last season,” Clerk Bai sighed. “He has been recuperating since then in his home estates. Elder Li Wei was the replacement for him, in fact. The other elders here at the time agreed with Elder Li Wei. We had been asking for someone to do this for four months now.”

“So now that I am here, I am hardly going to leave? Where is Elder Li Wei? Can he not rescind the clearance status of request?” she asked, trying not to sound as annoyed as she was beginning to feel.

“And that is why you are here,” an authoritative voice echoed through the room.

They both stood hurriedly, as did the other clerks. The woman by the map at the other end of the room also turned to glance at the door but only to nod slightly before looking back at the map again.

“Greetings, Elder Mu!”

The various clerks all saluted the dumpy-looking old man with a balding head and a beard he would probably have called scholarly and dared anyone else to doubt it. She also saluted, noting the seven silver slashes on his robes marking him as a Dao Seeking expert and seven-star ranked elder.

“When we asked for a high ranked hunter I hoped they would actually send someone from Blue Water City,” Elder Mu said, appraising her dubiously. “I suppose you will have to do. What rank and family are you from?”

“Nine-star ranked Recovery Hunter Jun Arai, of the West Flower Picking Town Hunter Pavilion,” she stated politely, saluting him and proffering her jade talisman with the two-handed salute as was appropriate.

Her introduction just made him click his tongue as he walked over to a cabinet by the wall and poured himself some wine. She suppressed the annoyance in her heart with her mantra. It would be typical that she now met one of these elders here. The talisman was yanked from her hands by his qi, flying over to land in his grasp.

“Promotion in four years… entered at five-star rank with excellent theoretical results… Physical path cultivation at the equivalent to peak Qi Refinement and… hum…”

He trailed off and eyed her dubiously as he looked at her mission ratings, no doubt.

“You advanced each year on practical merits, not failing a single exam, achieving nine-star ranking at the age of sixteen? Nineteen trips all the way to the slopes of the Great Mount, including two solo trips? Average of one nine-star ranked mission completed per season since your promotion… and a long catalogue of team requests from various influences including the Ling and Kun clans for you and your sister, who I note is not here.”

The other clerks all turned to stare at her as if she were some strange mushroom that had just grown out of the floor with hitherto unknown and highly novel properties.

“…”

She maintained her salute and focus on Elder Mu, studiously ignoring the looks.

“Mmmmm,” the elder sighed and finally waved a hand telling her to sit. “I suppose you are qualified to the task.”

-Why thank you, she mentally muttered, feeling a bit aggrieved in her heart, but at least he was impressed with the record so maybe he was just one of the old-timers from before the Three Schools Conflict led to the rules being relaxed to the degree they had been.

“Thank you for your evaluation, Honoured Elder Mu,” she replied politely, saluting him again and taking a seat as all the other clerks returned to their various tasks.

“Might I presumptuously ask if Old Elder Fei is well? I heard he was injured and he was one of my teachers when I first started out with the Hunter Pavilion,” she added respectfully.

“Mmmmph – recovering well. He should be fit to return to his duties before the end of the next season. The loss of such a capable Immortal ranked elder has been keenly felt,” Elder Mu replied, his tone softening ever so slightly.

“Please allow me to send my best wishes for his speedy recovery,” she said, standing again to offer him a salute with her cup of tea.

Elder Mu nodded, seeming a bit mollified at that, confirming to her relief that he was just one of the old-timers who was a bit fusty about the standards, and not one of the elitist buggers who believed the whole thing had gone to the Northern Tang continent in a handbasket.

“So, regarding Elder Li Wei,” Clerk Bai interjected politely. “With your permission, Elder Mu?”

Elder Mu waved a hand and Clerk Bai took over the explanation while she just sipped her tea and listened.

“Elder Li Wei… has caused some friction since his appointment here,” Clerk Bai said, sitting back. “Normally, we draw many of our auxiliary gatherers from the outer disciples of the sect. We even facilitate the informal trade of our own contribution merits for their sect contributions, however they choose to manage them.

“Elder Li Wei, though, has taken to bringing in people from West Flower Picking Town and even Blue Water City, mainly from the Ha clan there, to fulfil those roles.

“In truth they are certainly more… competent, theoretically, but they lack the local knowledge and are usually quite arrogant. They are also not affiliated with the Pavilion, causing friction between us, the Jade Willow Sect and the people of Jade Willow Village.”

Clerk Bai shuffled through the contents of the desk and found a jade tablet, skimming it for a second before continuing. “Elder Li Wei, as far as we know, went out on patrol and didn’t report back two days ago – necessitating us to implore Elder Mu to very graciously step out of his seclusion.”

Elder Mu made a noise over his wine cup that suggested expedience more than graciousness was the reason there, but waved for Clerk Bai to continue with his explanation.

“So you want me to find out what has happened to Elder Li Wei,” she said, finally understanding all the seals on the scroll, “or the Ha clan does, at least.”

“Indeed,” Elder Mu agreed, stroking his beard.

“Why do you need me to go find him, though?” she asked, frowning, because this also stank of the same issue as her other ‘find people’ request.

“That, you would have to ask someone in West Flower Picking Town. I can only assume it is because you were already on the way here and qualified,” Clerk Bai posited.

-Wait… she stared at him, thinking of the corpse in the vault and the fates of Ha Fenfang, Nen Hong and Nen Shirong.

-Could Fenfang, Hong and Shirong be part of that?

-That makes no sense though, she immediately countered her own suspicion. Ha Fenfang picked flowers for a living, but that is not the same thing… and neither Nen Hong nor Nen Shirong would have any background in such knowledge.

“Do you know any of them?” she asked, the wheels of her mind still spinning trying to find what was bothering her.

“Any of…?” Clerk Bai asked.

“The people who Elder Li Wei was bringing in, these people from West Flower Picking Town and the Ha clan,” she clarified, frowning.

“I would recognise a few to look at,” Clerk Bai frowned.

“I cannot help,” Elder Mu sighed. “However, enquiries can be made.”

“The vast majority stayed at a compound associated with the Ha clan outside of town,” Clerk Bai mused. “They didn’t mingle and those that did were very arrogant and caused issues in a variety of ways with the locals.”

-So not only people like Ha Fenfang, but actual scions of the Ha clan are involved in this? she mused. Though that might well mean that some of them made an impression?

“Oh,” she nodded, seeing where this was going. “The local youths helping out with these missions ensures that the local agricultural economy works smoothly.”

“Indeed. An influx of such people from West Flower Picking Town effectively cut out the middleman and many are unhappy that wealthy farmers who have few roots here are taking away opportunities for them to advance,” Clerk Bai murmured, his reproving tone telling her his opinion on that.

“Exactly, and there have been a few fights and such. One teahouse was levelled a month ago, I am led to understand,” Elder Mu said, looking annoyed, and took another deep drink of his wine.

“If he was a Nascent Soul cultivator and someone killed him out there, you are aware that there is nothing I can do? You should tell the Military Authority or bother the Ha clan, in all honesty,” she replied, after taking a sip of her own tea.

Someone deciding to quietly off a problem wasn’t unheard of, and while a Nascent Soul Pavilion Elder who was also associated with the Blue Gate School was a powerful local force, there would be family experts out here stronger than him and certainly ancestors in small local clans and maybe even families at Dao Seeking, maybe even the odd reclusive Immortal who might lower themselves if the blame could be shifted or obfuscated.

“I am well aware of that…” Elder Mu replied, thankfully understanding her quandary.

“—If I might?” Clerk Bai interjected politely.

“Of course,” Elder Mu said, waving a hand for Clerk Bai to continue speaking.

“All the local evidence supports the idea that he went missing within the borders of Yin Eclipse itself,” Clerk Bai explained, shuffling his papers until he found whatever he was looking for. “He took a group of those who were brought here from the city up into the mountains, purportedly to reconnoitre the ginseng fields ahead of the season’s harvest.”

“And this was?” she asked.

“That was a week ago, just after he bumped up that request to be cleared this month.” Clerk Bai clarified. “He was, apparently, due to return no later than two days ago and when he did not, Elder Mu was notified.”

Elder Mu sighed deeply and poured himself another cup of wine, clearly not impressed with the whole chain of events.

“Furthermore,” Clerk Bai continued, “Elder Li Wei had also taken it upon himself to personally deliver the village’s gifts for Patriarch Ha Dongfei’s birthday celebrations… and the upcoming celebration for Ha Changming forming a True Gold grade Golden Core at the age of twelve… and also ask for blessings for the harvest ahead.”

“Isn’t that kind of thing usually done by the village elders?” she asked.

“…”

“Ah, problems,” she nodded as they both just looked at her.

-Problems… two days…

“Ah!” she face-palmed.

“There is a problem?” Elder Mu asked, frowning at her.

“I ran into corpses on my way out of the Red Pit yesterday,” she said. “I was attacked on the way out, but one of them, a youth from the Ha clan, was signed into the secure vault last night. The other three were from West Flower Picking Town and they probably died… between two to four days ago. I have visual recordings of the scene of their demise and the three corpses that… have not yet been recovered.”

“A team that got lost by some other entrance?” Clerk Bai mused, sitting back with a frown.

“Nope,” she shook her head, pulling up the recording of the scene and displaying it for them in the middle of the table.

“Haiii…” Elder Mu took one look at it and sighed in disgust.

“The three children you can see in the scene here are all from West Flower Picking Town: Ha Fenfang, a scion of a very minor and somewhat troubled family within the Ha clan; Nen Hong and Nen Shirong, a brother and sister who were her close friends. All of them were Qi Condensation spiritual cultivators with next to no knowledge of herb lore. Dead in the middle of the Red Pit.”

“…”

“I do not see a youth here?” Elder Mu remarked.

“And you only recovered one corpse?” Clerk Bai asked.

“I was attacked by an adult tetrid stalker on the edge of the pit, while traversing an unreported landslide, and in the chaos of my escape I was only able to return with one body, the Ha clan youth.”

“Understandable,” Clerk Bai nodded.

“And the youth?” Elder Mu added.

“I recovered him a short time after the tetrid stalker attack, he fled this scene only to die later of yin qi poisoning trying to leave the Red Pit,” she explained.

“I think we had better go see this recovered corpse of yours,” Elder Mu said, standing up with a scowl on his face.

“I think we better had,” she agreed.

Arriving back at the storage hall, she found it deserted, although given the time of day and the character of the four minding it, that wasn’t that surprising, and in any case Elder Mu was able to just walk right through, opening everything as he went. They stepped back into the vault and she instantly had the temptation to punch the wall. Her pot was still there, but the contents were gone. More immediately important though, the corpse was also missing.

Pulling out her talisman and scrip, she stared at the links, which were intact, then at the talisman.

“Where is the body?” Elder Mu asked, stroking his beard with narrowed eyes.

“Not where it should be,” she muttered, walking over to the access point. “I entered all the data last night as well. They even had some disciple stay here and watch me to help in case I couldn’t do it… Ha… Kwan?”

“Clerk Bai?”

“…”

The clerk pulled up his own scrip and looked through what she had to assume was the registry of people associated with the Pavilion. “There is no Ha Kwan stationed here this month… in fact… no Ha Kwan on our lists at all.”

Pulling up the records, there was no entry of a corpse on it, even though she was totally certain she had sent it through. Belatedly, she pulled up her talisman and checked its own outgoing log.

‘Transmission rescinded: State Error, Improper Code.’

She gave in and kicked the wall by the jade loci access point hard enough to make the wall vibrate slightly. Elder Mu gave her a sideways look as she tried to avoid hopping on the spot from the pain.

Wordlessly, she handed him the talisman and he stared at it.

“I can swear to you by the three auspicious Heavenly Fates and the ancestral ghost of my mother that I entered it all correctly,” she said flatly, ignoring the mild sense of passing oppression in her mind as she spoke.

“Elder Hui!” Elder Mu said to the air at large.

They stood there in silence for a few moments, as she still seethed in her thoughts and Clerk Bai poked at his tablet, while Elder Mu paced around her pot, staring at it.

“Seeing Elder Mu!” a tall man with drooping brows, wearing the robes of a five-star ranked elder, entered the room and saluted smartly. “How can this servant be of service?”

“Who was overseeing here yesterday?” Elder Mu said shortly, still pondering her pot.

“Elder Geng… I think?” Elder Hui said, a bit taken aback. “Unless he was called out to oversee the harvest… then his deputy should be… uh… Ha Yong?”

“A junior official?” Clerk Bai frowned, glancing at the list again.

“Er… yes, he was appointed to the task by Elder Li Wei… just after he arrived.”

“Everywhere I find this Elder Li Wei causing me to lose more hair,” Elder Mu scowled, giving his beard a stroke that was verging on a jerk, the aura in the room turning a fraction oppressive.

“Apologies Elder Mu, what seems to be the issue?” Elder Hui asked, taking a step backward and bowing.

“There should, according to Hunter Jun, have been a corpse here… a youth from the Ha clan and... what was in the pot?”

“A live mutate Soul Foundation meek yin ginseng – that killed the four of them,” she said, grinding her teeth.

“Well that explains why you had it sealed,” Elder Mu nodded appreciatively.

“It was a dangerous spirit plant, an active mutate,” she nodded. “I sealed it and suppressed it.”

“Transporting it for a senior?” Elder Hui said, eyeing her dubiously.

“Do not dig yourself deeper than you already are, Hui Bolin,” Elder Mu growled. “Go find out what that Ha Yong was doing yesterday. Call back Elder Geng as well.”

“Erm… Elder Geng is liaising with the… tax officials,” Elder Hui pointed out somewhat awkwardly.

“Mmmmph,” Elder Mu narrowed his eyes and huffed slightly.

“I shall go seek out the whereabouts of Ha Yong,” Elder Hui said, saluting with barely trembling hands now under the gaze of Elder Mu and almost running from the room.

“…”

They made their way back to the Mission Hall in silence. Once there, Elder Mu spent a few minutes in conference with two other summoned clerks before sending them off, after which a runner appeared to call him away to speak with the tax officials from Blue Water City. Clerk Bai also begged his leave at that point and went off to make enquiries about the lost corpse and this mysterious ‘Ha Kwan’, so she was left to her own devices.

It took a pathetically short length of time for her to read through the mission ‘briefing’ documents left for her. They basically restated what Clerk Bai and Elder Mu had already told her, but somewhat less helpfully. The main takeaway was that someone senior enough in the Ha clan to have their current patriarch’s ear had taken a personal interest in matters. Ha Li Wei was to be found, or, if he was unfortunately dead, she was to recover and repatriate him – along with whatever had killed him, or evidence thereof.

After reading through them for a second time, she set that aside and asked one of the other clerks for up to date local maps and information on the various herb fields in the vicinity of the village and also an itinerary of Elder Li Wei’s most recent field trips. The first two were easy enough – the latter, though, only revealed to her that Elder Li Wei had had others fill out his jade-work for him... and incompetently, at that.

She had just finished making sense of what they hadn’t filled in when Clerk Bai returned.

Standing, she gave him a polite greeting.

“I have good news and possibly bad news for you, Miss Jun,” Clerk Bai said, returning her greeting and waving for a servant to bring tea and refreshments.

“Bad news first, please,” she said drily. “That way it’s all out there together.”

“An admirable way to view things,” Clerk Bai said taking a seat. “You will have to complete the teaching mission before you return. Apparently if you do not, it will count as a mark on your record. The elders have already amended the mission, so they hope you can start today. The good news is that they rescinded the clearance request status on it, with the assurance that you would complete it in full.”

-I guess it is good news for the local Pavilion and the village elders… she thought sourly. They get their training and there is no longer a tax demerit over it not being completed, and all the onus falls on me.

“How… understanding of them,” she replied, schooling her face and feeding her annoyance to her mantra. “And what of Li Wei?”

“That… Patriarch Ha has taken a personal interest apparently, which is to say someone in the Ha clan has told him that a ‘promising elder’ in a ‘logistically important’ Pavilion for them might have suffered an embarrassing failure. Apparently he wishes to hear ‘good news’ before his birthday,” Clerk Bai added with a sardonic smile.

“Wonderful,” she said, fighting back a grimace. “And what of the other issue?”

“Enquiries are being made, still,” Clerk Bai sighed. “It is causing some angry complaints. Elder Mu was already unhappy about being called back to active duty – he had entered seclusion a century ago to work on refining his ‘Principle’ as I understand it. The structure of the Pavilion has changed quite a bit since then… How can I put this politely? Your record speaks for itself, but for many, the family name sings louder?”

“I believe I understand the issue,” she said diplomatically, being quite familiar with it from West Flower Picking Town as well.

“There is no sign of the body, or your ginseng, and the weather makes searching for both…” Clerk Bai trailed off as the tea and food arrived, looking at her apologetically.

“Nobody can search for anything easily in this weather, especially not a yin-attributed water spirit herb or a corpse infused with yin qi,” she agreed, suddenly feeling tired again.

“Please be reassured; this is a serious matter,” Clerk Bai said, leaning forward. “Those goods were in secure storage. Their removal is a theft, and a massive breach of our rules. The culprits will be found and the next of kin of the deceased will likely be given reparations for the indignity if the corpse cannot be recovered. You will be compensated for the lost spirit herb, or you can wait for it to be recovered.”

“I take it that will have to wait on a committee of elders to oversee the request as well?” she asked rubbing her temples.

Clerk Bai grimaced apologetically. “That is the case I am afraid. This is a serious matter. Elder Mu will likely take a personal interest though and you seem to have made a favourable impression with him, so that is something that will count for a lot. However…”

“They will likely only compensate me the market price for a four-star rank Soul Foundation meek yin ginseng,” she said, sitting back and not bothering to hide her annoyance this time.

“You see it clearly,” Clerk Bai nodded apologetically. “The evidence you provided is compelling and it is an excellent recording, but without a root cutting or similar…”

“Your Pavilion still works by that set of guidelines…” she properly had to feed her frustrations to her mantra now. “Just take a sample of qi from the pot…”

“They will argue that qi can be faked, or tampered with… and certainly they will not accept that it was a mutate without a physical sample to evidence it,” Clerk Bai said apologetically.

“So… fifteen spirit stones,” she judged, pouring herself another cup of the tea.

“Twelve, actually. They took the Blue Water City aggregate price,” Clerk Bai said with a slightly embarrassed bob of his head.

“…”

She resisted the temptation to swear, that was barely half the worth of the plant and well under what she had spent to capture it.

“You understand how this looks, Clerk Bai,” she said, drumming her fingers on the table. “The elders here understand how this looks, do they not?”

“I do,” Clerk Bai agreed, his apologetic grimace nearly etched into his face at this point. “However, local politics—”

“—Yeah, yeah,” she sighed, waving a hand, to cut him off, understanding his point.

If she just sat here and opted to wait for the stolen goods to be ‘returned’ or it to become clear that that was not going to happen, she would probably win out. However, it would likely take weeks of back and forth. They would ensure that it was dragged through all kinds of bureaucracy and, much like the mess her sister Sana had gone through with the Ling clan a few years back, the shadow of it would stalk her for a good while.

The real issue, though, was that she would have to take part in those investigations and, in the efforts to save their own hides, those in the Pavilion would likely use the opportunity to somehow ensure that word of mouth painted her as the trouble-maker.

The elders were all likely linked to the Ha clan or other influences more than the Bureau. The Pavilion here was already being pressured and would likely invert right and wrong and put forward that this was a case of her trying to scam them rather than the other way around. They would ensure that she was stuck here, ‘taking part’ in their investigation long enough for her to fail her clearance missions, almost certainly. She would probably win out there as well… eventually, but it would take months of back and forth before her record was cleared…

Past precedents told her that in these local Hunter Pavilions, ‘failing’ clearance missions on such grounds was akin to gambling with the fates themselves. This was especially true given those in the Blue Water City Hunter Pavilion would take one look at this mess and see only the Ha clan eating its own tail and just shuffle everything associated with it to the bottom of the bureaucratic pile. As a result, her choice was to become an unwilling pawn in Pavilion politics or take twelve spirit stones and screw off.

It wasn’t much of a choice – she knew it, Clerk Bai knew it and whoever was set here to oversee it would know it was a gift from heaven to bury their own problems with at her expense.

“—And I assume that with the harvest on, the numbers for the teaching mission will also drop, now that it is not clearance…” she said with a deep sigh, swirling the tea in her cup.

“Eleven, mostly from the Jade Willow Sect and some influential local families,” Clerk Bai said, pushing a jade scrip over to her. “They hope that you can start today.”

She skimmed the list, which was six from the Jade Willow Sect and five from local families. Those from the Jade Willow were all Qi Refinement, with one Golden Core cultivator leading them. Those from the local families were a mix: two Qi Condensation, one Qi Refinement and two more at Golden Core.

“Nobody from the Pavilion?” she asked, curious.

“They are all tied up with tasks here… same with the other promising locals who were originally selected to be skilled up,” Clerk Bai replied.

“So long as the rain keeps up, going near the local ginseng fields, or any of the nearby outer valleys of the suppression zone, with a bunch of untested people is trying to set me up with difficulties in every direction,” she pointed out. “Especially if the request now specifies that I am to start today. Looking for Li Wei and that at the same time is also… unfeasible, I hope you can appreciate.”

“Indeed,” Clerk Bai conceded. “Elder Mu has been caught up with the tax officials, but once he has resolved certain matters I imagine that will progress.”

She drummed her fingers on the table, thinking.

“There is no chance of grabbing some of these promising locals as well?” she asked.

“I appreciate your desire to make good by the village, but few will want to spare…”

“As I said, taking anyone up into the Outer Valleys today is a non-starter, probably tomorrow as well unless the rain stops overnight. In the rain, however, we can perform quite a bit of the orienteering out here. On the way here, I came to learn that through various circumstances there has been an infestation of Duo Li’s lotuses in the waterways to the south of the village?”

“…”

Clerk Bai stared at her then started to laugh. “You plan to take that bunch and have them go digging for those Duo Li’s water lotuses?”

“Is there a problem?” she asked, looking at him somewhat dubiously.

“No… my apologies,” Clerk Bai said, wiping tears from his eyes. “It will certainly be… educational for them.”

-That much is certainly true, she agreed with an inner eye roll.

As a solution, she was quite pleased with it. The rain meant the threat from the lotuses would be no worse than in the Outer Valleys. Various farmers likely needed the infestation cleared, which would mean more hands if word got out. There was also already a clearance request to get rid of the parent lotus as well. As an added bonus, she could go look at some of the spots Elder Li Wei had been investigating in the farmlands at the same time.

“I assume that the Pavilion will supply me with materials?” she asked.

“Indeed,” Clerk Bai nodded, passing her a talisman.

She skimmed it and sighed inwardly. It was a large jar of low end ward stones, a few low grade formations cores, two dozen pots and a few other sundries like luss cloth gloves and boot linings along with a dozen rather mediocre spirit wood shovels.

“I hate talking about cold numbers,” she said, sitting back, “but this new request says nothing of the remuneration. It was originally fifty spirit stones, which would then involve deductions for the materials used.”

“Twenty, with deductions,” Clerk Bai replied, looking a bit embarrassed. “That was what the majority of the Committee of Pavilion Elders decided.”

-Fates, I hate these local Pavilions sometimes, she complained in her heart, the politics gets you coming and going every fate-thrashed time!

“How understanding of them,” she remarked as neutrally as possible, burying her annoyance yet again with her mantra.

-If this keeps up I will be drinking in the bath again tonight…

“The request to search for Elder Li Wei notes that the Pavilion will render me material support if required,” she mused, seeing a way to potentially solve that issue at least.

“I believe that is the case,” Clerk Bai agreed, pulling up that request.

“In that case, I will need a storage ring capable of holding bodies with intact foundations, a crate of low grade ward stones, at least one anchored teleport talisman – to the village here – and certainly a full set of refined cores for setting up formations,” she rattled off the list, checking them off on her fingers.

“…”

“They will not like that,” Clerk Bai remarked, leaning back again and giving her an appraising look.

“I looked at where Elder Li Wei was exploring. He was close to the Red Pit where he was ranging in the ginseng fields and the jade-work filed on his behalf is so patchy I could sieve beans with it. I just came from up there – if I am to go back, and in the rain, it may be as dangerous as the High Valleys,” she stressed. “I did not come all this way to die, Clerk Bai.”

“I can appreciate your concerns there,” Clerk Bai agreed. “I will take that request directly to Elder Mu.”

“If it makes you feel better,” she tapped the mission to search for Elder Ha Li Wei, “you can use the wording in this to charge any I use to the Ha clan, assuming you feel confident they will actually pay you for them.”

“Hah,” Clerk Bai barked a laugh. “I will see what I can do.”

“If they want me to start today, when will these fortunate souls be assembled?” she queried as he stood up.

“Shall we say midday before the central pagoda here?” Clerk Bai mused, standing up.

She glanced outside. It was barely past the normal hour for breakfast, so midday was close to five hours away still. That at least gave her ample time to prepare things.

“Someone will come to see you all off in any event,” Clerk Bai said as she walked with him to the door. “In any case, I will take my leave to continue looking into these other matters. If you require anything between now and then, please just ask a clerk of the Pavilion to come and seek me out.”

“That is very generous of you, Clerk Bai,” she murmured, offering him a parting salute of thanks which he returned.

“…”

She watched Clerk Bai hurry off in the direction of the main pavilion, dodging puddles with a sour feeling in her heart.

“Sister dearest, I really hope that mission in Blue Water City that Ling Yu dragged you off on is throwing up as many headaches as my week is,” she muttered, staring out at the rain, which was still falling, miffed that she was having to put up with all this mess on her own.

~ Jun Sana – Blue Water City, Ling Estate ~

Squatting down beside the large potted plant, staring at it pensively, Jun Sana tried to tune out Ling Yu’s prattling. The daughter of the Governor of Blue Water City was truly a good friend, despite their widely different social statuses – someone close to her own age who wasn’t her sister, or a work colleague, with whom she could talk about all kinds of random things. However, right now, she didn’t need to hear about whatever weird thing had brought some young nobles from across the sea. Not when she was trying to work out what species of potentially horrible fungus was attempting to mutate her friend’s pet.

Keeping a spirit herb as a pet was hardly unusual, especially auspicious ones like sun orchids, singing jasmine or, in this case, a little moon song ginseng. It could even get out of its pot and wander around a short distance if it was so inclined. What had afflicted it likely wasn’t down to anything Ling Yu had done at least. Her friend doted on it like it was her firstborn child and was about as well versed in the herb lore of that sub-species as a bureau elder specialising in plant pets of the rich and famous. The plant itself also reciprocated her friend’s care and attention with little displays of illusion and by helping flowers in the gardens here bloom.

As such, it was saddening to see it curled up and shivering deep in the pot, while several small greyish-red mushrooms grew in the middle. Also perturbing, because despite being a rather mild and carefree plant, moon song ginseng were undisputed heavyweights in the hierarchy of Yin Eclipse’s montane plant life.

“You're certain nobody has done something weird with it?” she asked again.

Ling Yu was shaken out of her monologue about the beautiful woman on the boat, whoever that was, to reconnect with the reason she was actually here. “—Eh? Eum… I don’t think so?”

“Has it left your quarters at all in the last few days?” she asked, running through the options in her head.

The mould or mushroom trying to encroach the pot's soil had come back twice in the last two days already, despite the entire pot being emptied and the soil replaced.

“My cousin mentioned something about a party and wanting to help her friend bloom some plants…” Ling Yu furrowed her small brow. “But I was sure she didn’t actually use my Little Blue Moon in the end.”

She stared again at the mushrooms in the middle. They were greyish-red, about the size of her thumb. The tendrils in the soil had a greenish-white pall that was decidedly unhealthy.

If they had been purple and pale green, she would have had one of the Ling clan’s Immortals cage the pot the day before and already be looking to see who was trying to kill Ling Yu, but greyish-red and that shape of a tall cone wasn’t anything she was familiar with.

“So do you know what is wrong with it?” Ling Yu asked, leaning over her shoulder. “I don’t want Little Blue to get hurt by this nasty mushroom.”

“The mushrooms are stealing its auspicious energies,” she explained, puffing out her cheeks and sitting back in mild frustration.

“As far as I can see they haven’t spored yet, which is good. But somehow Blue Moon has been touched by their spores, or maybe some qi residue from them. They are trying to parasitize it.”

“So you have a solution?” Ling Yu pressed, looking concerned.

“There is,” she said. “But here, in Blue Water City, it is likely to be a bit bothersome… and expensive.”

“Money is your concern?” Ling Yu eyed her suspiciously. “How much are we talking…?”

“A few thousand pure spirit stones in catalysts and a set of herbs aligned to the five elements that have purifying properties and qi-gathering natures. Unless the Ling family has a bunch of auspiciously aligned five elements herb plots squirrelled away I've never seen?”

“…”

“Really now. Did you somehow forget who my family is?” her friend asked with an amused sideways look at her.

“Well…” she retorted, rolling her eyes. “I mean, sure your father is the current City Governor… your uncle Jiang is the chief of the city region’s Civil Authority Bureau and I believe your other uncle Fei is a clan elder?”

“And my Auntie Tao is a Vice-Headmistress of the Blue Gate School…” Ling Yu said with a mock sniff.

“Knowing all that… you’re worried about a few thousand pure spirit stones? No price is too expensive for my Little Blue Moon to not get sick!?!” her friend’s inflection at the end was a bit more comedic than serious, but her point was well made.

“To you, yes, but your family might not agree,” she muttered.

“Humph,” Ling Yu scowled, but her reaction shared her own concern that the Ling estate might not be as keen on ‘curing’ the unfortunate ginseng if it put them several thousands of pure spirit stones out of pocket.

“Not to mention, I remember the fiasco with this pot,” she poked it viciously. “Your younger brother claimed I was trying to cheat you out of spirit stones… and your older brother then said that I was trying to take advantage of you.”

“…”

Ling Yu had the good grace to not wince at that, even if it was several years in the past. It was still a sore point to her that, as a newly minted Herb Hunter on her third mission, she had been sent here to consult on the creation of this very pot. It had been couched as a training exercise for her only for her to discover that the family ‘expert’, who was also Ling Yu’s tutor, had been basically making it wrong.

Nobody liked being upstaged by a fourteen year old girl from the sticks. She had returned in tears and her father and Old Ling had gone to the city and presumably had a few words with the Bureau here, because whatever happened afterwards that tutor had been sweetness and light ever since. The only issue was that Ling Yu’s brat of a younger brother, Ling Mu, had had it in for her for losing him some kind of face in the process.

-Wait…

She turned back to the pot and, with a wave of her hand, used her qi to excavate all the dirt, taking care not to disturb the mushroom which was now sprouting on the top of the pile sending out ‘bad vibes’. Grasping the ginseng carefully, she took it out as well and handed it to Ling Yu, who started to cuddle it. It reciprocated her gesture, looking remarkably and expressively sorry for itself, summoning little illusions of weeping faces, its leaves curled around it like a blanket.

The pot thoroughly emptied, she peered inside it, looking at the formations and wards on its interior.

“What are you looking for?” Ling Yu asked, peering into the pot with her.

“I am not sure,” she muttered. “Something else is off… Is this the original pot?”

“Oh… no, this is a duplicate from the store I had made last year,” Ling Yu frowned. “The other one should be in the storehouse; it needs some adjustments made.”

“Looks the same though…” she noted.

“Oh… yeah, they liked that design so much that most of the other pots we got afterwards for the estate followed the same model and aesthetic. Out in the town they even sell copies and call it the ‘Ling Style’ pot,” Ling Yu said with an eye roll.

She stared back at Little Blue Moon, running through the extensive list of beneficial things moon song ginseng could do for a cultivator. Mostly this was a plant that had untold benefits to being kept alive, rather than refined, but it was also…

Pulling out her scrip, she skimmed to the alchemy sections and set it to searching for spirit root purification while she kept looking at the pot.

By the time the search came back, she still hadn’t worked out what had been done to it, though something certainly had been done. Glancing through the list, she ruled out the thirty or so different results regarding the ginseng being ‘healthy.’ It was like Myriad Shell Crabs in that regard, a boundless cornucopia of auspiciousness that would only enhance most harmonious spaces.

-That left…

She ruled out the pill immediately. It would only be helpful to a Chosen Immortal with a ‘Yin Heavens’ type spirit root.

The other two, however…

“It really hasn’t left this annex in the last few months, has it?” she asked, perusing them.

The first was about inducing a deviation in the ginseng root which could be harvested and used to promote the quality of the supporting elemental spirit root accordingly. That was a bit convoluted, though, and required a bunch of knowledge about feng shui that was rather uncommon.

“Except for when we got the formations re-done a few months back,” Ling Yu replied.

“You got the formations re-done?” she asked, frowning, her eye falling on the final entry on the list.

It was quite simple: if you killed the root in a certain sideways manner – which was to say, cruelly – and then made it the focus of a formation, you could then use the accrued suffering of its death to refine your spiritual constitution and make your meridians more attuned to life type qi. You didn’t even have to use the ginseng itself. Its purpose was just to become the focal point of… of the formation.

“Yeah…” Ling Yu put her chin on her hands. “That snotty brat's teacher owed mother some favour, so she got him to repay it by fixing up some of the ones that were getting old in this part of the estate. It was a huge nuisance… My brothers both got made to participate as a teaching experience and both of them are really bad at them, so it took far longer than it should have. Even Grandmaster Wen got annoyed at them after a while.”

“Remind me what your little brother’s spirit root is again?” she asked, looking over that method again.

It was purchasable from the Hunter Bureau and also cross-referenced to a bunch of other sects’ collections, including the Orchid Pavilion and the Blue Gate School.

“Uhuh… yang life with minor water. It’s really high grade,” Ling Yu replied, her annoyance at that bleeding through into her tone.

“Well, I have good news then… and bad news,” she stood, stretching.

“Bad news first,” Ling Yu said without hesitating.

“You can add a zero onto the price of fixing this mess, and your little brother is trying to kill Little Blue Moon and refine it to make his spirit root stronger.”

Ling Yu’s flawless eyebrow twitched as a vein pulsed slightly in her temple.

Truthfully, her rage right now was very understandable. If there was a bottom line anywhere in her friend, it was her herb garden and Little Blue Moon. The sun could fall, the house of Ling could likely come to ruin, all her worldly possessions be stolen away and so long as she still had her Little Blue, a first meetings gift to her from the Headmaster of the Blue Gate School himself, awarded in the first auspicious hour after her birth, everything would be just fine.

It was in fact how they had originally become friends, a shared interest in arranging gardens, although where Ling Yu gravitated more towards weird things like her ginseng or the singing trees in her aunt's estate, she tended to enjoy the arrangement aspect and experimenting with feng shui more. Probably because she got to see too much of the sneaky, dangerous side of sapient spirit herbs.

The air in the room had dropped a good few degrees at this point. The bedsheets around Ling Yu were starting to sparkle with frost as well. It was easy to forget that she was the cultivation genius of this generation of the family. Her younger brother was only ‘stronger’ than her at a younger age due to the resource disparity in nurturing male and female heirs – and because he had attracted the personal tutelage of a few old elders. Had she been born a man, Ling Yu, who had just broken through to Nascent Soul earlier in the year, despite being only a year younger than her, would have likely been at Severing Origins, if not actually Dao Seeking already. Her older brother Ling Fan was only twenty and barely Dao Seeking as it was. The snotty ‘brat’ Ling Mu was fifteen and had also just broken through to Nascent Soul.

“I’ll kill him!” Ling Yu hissed, scrunching the sheets in her hands as they cracked into shards under the freezing pressure of her friend’s qi.

“While I sympathise, I think your family will not welcome that,” she said, wincing. In truth, she shared the sentiment – the younger sibling treated her like a servant to be bullied and the older one as both eye candy with a presumptive intent to be toyed with and as a servant to be bullied.

“You said there was good news…” Ling Yu hissed, her breath misting the air and the blue irises of her eyes shimmering.

“The good news is that the short-term solution here is to send Little Blue to live with your Aunt Tao in the school or her estate for a while,” she said. “Weren’t you saying your aunt wanted to spend time with you? In the meantime, we get him a new pot and set up a purification and nurturing formation. After that, you will likely want to get the formations here completely redone, or move house, I am afraid.”

“…”

Taking a deep breath, Ling Yu managed to get a hold of herself and exhaled. “I can go stay with my Aunt for a while; she did want to spend more time with me ahead of my potential enrolment in the Blue Gate School.

“So what about that evil fungus?” her friend asked, eyeing it on the top of the pile of dirt. “What even is that? It makes my skin crawl.”

“The fungus? I’m still not sure,” she admitted. “I’d hazard that has to do with whoever you got the soil from and the nature of the formation. We should go look around the gardens outside though.”

“Yes, let’s,” Ling Yu murmured, standing up and brushing some of the dirt of her robe with a determined glower.

…

Thirty minutes of poking around outside revealed a dozen other spirit plants and one tree that had the same fungus starting to infect them. The garden itself appeared to have harboured it for a year or more – the fungus drawing qi from most of the plants and having an extensive mycelial network below the soil.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, their endeavour had garnered some notice quite quickly, and they were soon joined by the chief gardener for the estate, who wanted to know why the Young Miss was digging in the roots of a spirit tree with a mattock… among other things. Upon learning that there was a fungus infecting a wide swathe of the more important spirit plants in it, the old man garnered a complexion akin to a thunder cloud and stormed off to find the estate's seneschal.

At that point, other servants and helpers with the gardens started to get involved properly, digging test pits and doing various divinations. The true extent of the fungus was finally pinned down to half the manor. In the process, her own rather basic feng shui divinations, and then the much more systematic investigations of Chief Gardener Tuo, confirmed their suspicions that the widespread infestation had been caused by a very minor and previously believed to be insignificant change to the feng shui of the gardens.

Arriving back at the main courtyard, they all convened beneath a pagoda on one of the grassy lawns. The gardeners all had very gloomy faces and the seneschal of the manor, Sir Kao, had the look of a man who had just seen his beautifully balanced accounts of the year dissolve into a mass of debt and overspend.

“How in the fates didn’t you find this problem, Old Tuo?” Sir Kao said eventually, after calling for some wine to calm his humours.

“It’s not that we didn’t see it; it’s that the change is so subtle, and the fungus so… innocuous, that it has so far passed unremarked upon,” the old man said with a scowl.

“I don’t think this is Chief Gardener Tuo’s fault,” Ling Yu interjected. “My brothers did a lot of messing about with it, especially elder brother Fan, changing the alignment so it better suited the law he got for becoming an Inner Disciple of the Blue Gate School.”

“That may be, but with the young masters’ current support it will be difficult to make that blame stick,” Sir Kao grumbled. “Rather than that, what can be done to resolve it?”

“Honoured Steward, Sir Kao,” Sana interjected politely at this point. “The issue at the moment is that the fungus is benefiting and the other plants are not. The good news is that the broken alignments can be fixed quite easily – and with little expenditure relative to the effort involved.”

Steward Kao brightened up a bit at that, while the old gardener nodded.

“If we re-establish the old alignments, the fungus infection will naturally be curtailed. There are several relatively common yet spiritually aggressive species of herbs that will re-order the soil’s innate qi over the course of a season or so, making the fungus much less likely to further mutate,” she finished.

“A good assessment,” the old gardener agreed. “I am unfamiliar with the fungus, but its characteristics appear largely benign, until it was exposed to whatever had promoted the wider change in the feng shui of the gardens in this wing of the estate.”

She sighed, glad that he had said that rather than her.

“You imply that the new formations installed may be to blame?” Sir Kao frowned.

“That is the biggest, and most systematic, transformation of this estate’s alignments that has occurred in the last few years,” the old man said. “It is the place to start looking.”

“Yes, and if it did this to a relatively harmless fungus, there may be other hidden issues and unintentional mutations caused by this change…” she added. “Where did you source the spirit soil from? I assume it had to be changed after the formations were all updated?”

“It did. We got it through the usual channels. It is top quality, from South Grove,” Gardener Tuo said.

She went over to the nearest bed and crouched down, crumbling the dirt in her fingers before carefully tasting it. One of the advantages of a physical cultivation base was a good sensitivity for changes in qi. It tasted faintly familiar. An acerbic tang of yin, but with a faint… twisting sensation.

“Have you got any plants here from the western reaches?” she asked, pulling up a map on her scrip. “From around Bolai Village… or Jade Willow Village?”

Looking over the data, she shook her head, wondering if circumstances were toying with her. That was where the training mission they had landed from the clearance pool was. It was hard not to feel a bit bad having been reminded of it, when she was here and her sister was likely having to watch neophytes waste dozens of spirit stones’ worth of ward stones catching low grade… ginseng with all the headaches that entailed.

“Gardener Tuo?” the seneschal frowned.

“Nothing I've overseen, sir,” the old man frowned.

“Um… sir…” one of the maids nearby spoke up hesitantly.

“Yes?” Seneschal Kao said, turning to the maid in question and beckoning her forward.

“Um… Young Master Mu had the good fortune to purchase a mature red yin fire ginseng at the Ha clan’s auction two weeks ago. It came with its own pot and everything.”

“Oh. That,” the seneschal frowned. “I thought he wasn’t keeping it here?”

“He… erm…” the maid looked shifty.

“Go on, girl,” the seneschal commanded with a resigned sigh.

“The soil it came with wasn’t spirit soil… so he had us dump it out and swap the pot for a better one, rather than a cheap knockoff. We…” the maid looked increasingly awkward as she went on. “It was the Young Master’s order…”

“You swapped the pot with the one for my ginseng!” Ling Yu went from normal speaking tone to murderous screech in the space of a single sentence.

“He… just told us which pot to take from the storehouse… I’m…I’m…s… sorry, young miss!” The maid dropped to her knees, looking white as a sheet.

“Well that solves that mystery,” she muttered. “Can you bring the pot over?”

Two servants brought it over, and she flipped it over and pulled off the wood cover on the bottom to reveal the core of the formation on it. The formation was currently inactive, which was why she had missed it, but despite looking identical in most respects, it was indeed a pot attuned to a yin fire ginseng. Raising a yang life ginseng in it was akin to sitting in a bath and slitting your own wrists. The plant would have been quietly feeding the pot and not the other way around, while the fungus would have been growing freely and benefiting from both.

“…”

Ling Yu’s expression promised that there would likely be new maids in the estate before tomorrow if she had any say in the matter. It was a bit unfair, especially knowing how blame was likely to be apportioned, but probably they should have known better than to just mess about with all those things without checking in with the gardener or others first.

In all likelihood it also solved the mystery of the soil as well.

“Little Blue Moon dumped all the soil out, didn’t he?” she said.

“He did,” Ling Yu said with a scowl. “Twice!”

She could see her friend’s own anger there, for not having noticed and also harmed her own companion in the process. At least Little Blue Moon had dumped the soil inside as far as she was aware instead of further contaminating the garden.

“So the soil came from somewhere up here?” Gardener Tuo asked, peering at her map which was still projected in the air for all to see and pointing generally towards the area east of Jade Willow Village and north of Bolai and Red Lake.

“There are several places up there that would have yin fire ginseng – the Red Pit for starters,” she nodded, feeling a bit of a headache coming on. Her earlier assessment of the garden’s condition was probably off if they had dirt from up there.

“Yin fire ginseng grows in hot, dark, humid underhangs on the eastern edge where there is a lot of decay,” she said, manipulating the projected topographic map to show them the Red Pit. “The soil in the pot from that ginseng your young master bought may well have been outwash from caves higher up on the valley wall as well. If it was just dumped out here without proper treatment, all sorts of stuff could be in it. Blood ling trees grow up there.”

“…”

Now both Gardener Tuo and Sir Kao had ugly expressions, staring around the gardens.

“So what do you suggest?” Ling Yu asked, turning to her.

“Well, my earlier advice about it being easy to remedy…” she trailed off and sighed, and the gardener nodded, as did Sir Kao.

“Get rid of all the soil, check every plant, by hand, then pot them up, those you can, in normal clay pots with some low grade spirit soil,” she said. That part of the advice was mostly redundant, anyway – they would do it as a precaution just because of the risk of blood ling seeds if for no other reason.

“Once you are satisfied that there is no secondary contamination or mutations, I second getting a formations grandmaster in here to eyeball the formations that were upgraded last year and see if anything else is amiss, as Gardener Tuo already suggested. If I might be so bold, Grandmaster Mang from West Flower Picking Town might be someone worth inviting.”

“There are perfectly good formations masters here?” one of the aides next to the seneschal frowned.

She stared at him, trying not to wonder about the intelligence of those older than her. If even she could see the issue here, surely others could.

“Grandmaster Mang is a bit eccentric,” she said, “but he is very familiar with this kind of issue. It is not unheard of for there to be spirit soil contamination of this nature in the estates inland.”

“Hmm… quite, familiarity with the issue will make a repeat less likely.” The seneschal nodded.

“Also, Sir Kao,” she added. “Grandmaster Mang is currently here in Blue Water City, visiting his grand niece’s family. A carefully worded letter and a suitable gift for a young child would see you a lot of favour there.”

The seneschal gave her an appraising nod.

“See to it,” he commanded the nearby maids, who bowed respectfully, a senior maid hurrying off to set that in motion.

“—And what do we owe you for this… consultation? Miss Jun,” the seneschal added, turning back to her.

“Nothing. I was asked here by Yu, to see to her ginseng. This is part of the same request.”

Frankly, the Ling family was already paying her a whole spirit jade – one hundred pure spirit stones, no doubt at Ling Yu’s urging – at any rate, and they were also covering material costs, which was a nice bonus. It was over twice what Arai was getting for the teaching request. In addition, being generous here and getting some favour with Sir Kao was probably more valuable than some more spirit stones. Being a money-grubbing youngster didn’t get you anywhere in the long run, not unless your family was also a noble clan. Otherwise hunters like Ha Yun, a scion of the Ha clan in her own Pavilion, would never have lasted a week.

She watched as the seneschal gave some more orders to various servants and Gardener Tuo bustled off to find some lads to tear apart the gardens and save or isolate what they could.

-Oh, yes! She nearly slapped her forehead for forgetting.

“Gardener Tuo?” she called after him.

“Yes?” the old man asked, pausing to look over at her.

“We will be going by the Hunter Pavilion’s main hall in all likelihood,” she said. “Can I take a bit of the tree root and some other bits of infected plant? I can get them to identify the fungus without you having to pay extra, and probably find out for free if any mutations have occurred on those plants.”

The old man frowned and nodded, before heading off in the direction he had been.

“You could have just taken the fungus from my pot?” Ling Yu looked puzzled.

“I’m going to take that one, and a bunch of others besides,” she cast about, considering the different plants. “There are several species here. Odds are they all came from the caves, which means you might have algru in there as well.”

“You just want the contribution points on your record for handing in weird mutates for the Hunter Bureau’s bounties,” Ling Yu said with an amused whisper, poking her.

“That doesn’t hurt,” she said with a sheepish grin. “And it is saving Sir Kao money.”

They stood in silence, considering the gardens for a few moments longer before she spoke again.

“What are you going to do to your brothers?”

Ling Yu exhaled, and scrunched her hands into fists. “Tell Aunt Tao first, then probably father – although I might just leave all that joyous news to Uncle Kao. I’d dearly love to be the one to grind their noses in it, but they just cost us the price of redoing every formation in this estate and contaminated the whole garden. Even if I do nothing, they are going to sweat blood before the day is out.”

“They might just run off and stay with their friends until it blows over,” she pointed out. “Your grand uncles dote on them.”

“Uggh. Don’t remind me of those nasty old lechers,” Ling Yu scowled, before grabbing her arm and starting to lead her towards the entrance of the estate. “You said we needed to go out to get some stuff from the markets to help my Little Blue Moon?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “We will, and it’s probably quicker if we go do it than rely on people from the household.”

“Let’s go do that then, while they all sort out this mess. It’s far beyond my realm to mess with the estate formations anyway, let alone yours,” Ling Yu said a bit more brightly as they made their way back through the courtyards while maids and servants bustled towards the gardens looking annoyed.

“—You said that Juni might be in Blue Water City?” Yu added.

She looked sideways at the slightly younger girl, caught off guard by the change in topic.

“Juni might be… She had some strange set of missions from the Kun clan to do that would take her here,” she replied, trying to recall what Juni had said about those in passing before she left.

“We should see if we can meet up later, after we fleece those stupid old men in the central market,” Ling Yu giggled.

“We probably don’t need to go there. Likely we will have to go to the Little Harbour district or the docklands – certainly if you want a new pot,” she pointed out.

“Oh… that will be fun,” Ling Yu nodded. “But it would still be nice if we could meet up with Juni, at least. She has such fun tales about the interesting ruins inland and such.”

“Uhuh,” she nodded absently, being far too familiar with those so-called ‘interesting ruins’ to think that any tale about them could be considered ‘fun’.

“I wanted to go see one for my seventeenth birthday, or go into the valleys, but father made a face like Acala Buddha and refused,” Ling Yu went on, pouting in annoyance and flouncing a bit.

She sighed theatrically and put her arm around her friend’s shoulders and mock-commiserated with her as Ling Yu crossed her arms and pretended to sulk.

“So long as you’re paying for the table at a teahouse,” she said, hiding a faint smile.

“Please. You’re forgetting who my father is?” Ling Yu sniffed derisively. “I don’t have to pay for tables at teahouses, and neither do you, given you and Arai supply spirit herbs to half of them on personal contract these days.”

“Not likely. Your father is very forceful, what with his remarkable resemblance to Acala Buddha and all. My best friend is really forgetting what money is to other people,” she shot back, ignoring the second half, which was true, but didn’t fit with her cheeky dig.

“Ohhh… That’s rare,” Ling Yu giggled archly, grabbing a maid by the arm as they passed.

“We will be going out, bring us a pouch with spirit stones,” her friend told the maid.

The young woman looked like she was about to complain of all things, until Ling Yu gave a pointed look in the direction of the gardens. At that point, between her presence and the distant shouting, the maid got the hint and hurried off.

“What is it?” she asked, picking the thread of conversation back up and pretending to look around in confusion as they waited for the maid to return.

“I was under the impression that big sis Arai was your best friend. What did I do to get an upgrade?”

Rolling her eyes, she gave Ling Yu an amused ‘oh you’ shove. “You offered to pay for the table at the teahouse for all four of us.”

“Ah, so it’s just my money pouch who is your best friend,” Ling Yu said with a pretend pout.

“Says the person who just said money was no object,” she retorted as the maid finally arrived with the pouch containing more spirit stones than her whole house and garden would likely reach if she sold it via a scammer’s auction.

“So where do we need to go first?” Ling Yu said, swiftly tallying it up as they made their way out the door into the large courtyard that led to the Ling estate’s main gate.

“How much do you have in there?” she asked, curious.

“Enough,” Ling Yu replied with an eye roll, stashing it away.

“Well, we need to go to the docks if you want a pot that is at all cost-effective and not some gilded trash,” she mused, sorting out what they might need in her head. “The catalysts we can probably find in an alchemical store, but if we are going to the Little Harbour, we can likely get them cheaper there – especially as you will be buying bulk. Warehouses go wild for that.”

“And the herbs?” Ling Yu frowned. “Western plaza herb markets?”

“Maybe, but I think we need to go to Little Harbour for that as well. That’s where they unload the ships coming downriver. If we can’t get them there, or in a warehouse in the docks, we can go back via the central plaza and try the actual market and then the auction house.”

“Not the Hunter Pavilion?” Ling Yu frowned.

“They will charge me merit points, and more than I’d like – I want to gain merit points out of this, not spend them!” she replied, with her own mock pout.

“The Blue Gate School might be helpful there,” Ling Yu mused, “I have a few friends there who owe me favours.”

She nodded along as Ling Yu checked her talisman to see who was ‘around’ in the school, frowning, before stopping and slapping her forehead.

“What?” she asked.

“We should also go check out the central plaza anyway. Fan Shue just sent me a message saying that there was an Imperial Princess in the city, that important visitor I told you about earlier! She is apparently staying at the Golden Dragon Teahouse!”

“Isn’t that reason to avoid the central plaza?” she pointed out. “It will be packed with all sorts of layabouts.”

“True, but half of them will be cutting each other’s clothes to pieces in an effort to impress her, my brothers included. With any luck they might even get the snot beaten out of them while we are watching,” Ling Yu smirked, kicking a rock off the path through the estate’s gateway courtyard.

“That’s an excellent point,” she conceded as they walked out of the main gate of the estate, the guards bowing to Ling Yu as they passed.

“And if they aren’t, a few people owe me favours who can ensure that they do,” Ling Yu said with a very unladylike smile.

“I like your style, newfound best friend of mine who doesn't pay for tables,” she snickered, imagining those two idiots getting beaten up by one of Ling Yu’s friends or a disciple of Ling Yu’s Aunt, Ling Tao… or perhaps some other young master eager to impress Ling Yu.

“Oh you,” Ling Yu laughed, pushing her playfully in return as they made their way down the broad tree-lined street towards the central plaza of Blue Water City.

Sadly, they had only gone thirty paces before a fat raindrop hit her squarely on the head, followed by another then suddenly dozens more. All around them, people started cursing and ducking for cover. She watched it pass through her qi defences with a sigh and pulled out an umbrella, opening it for both of them.

“Rain from the east,” Ling Yu muttered, making a face.

“Don’t tell me you believe that superstition,” she said wryly.

“…”

Her friend shook her head and they started walking on again this time under the paper-cloth umbrella, the rain starting to turn the pavement speckled as merchants dragged out awnings and people started frantically searching for umbrellas and cursing the rising humidity.

“I wonder, does this mean the wet season is going to come early this year?” Ling Yu wondered distastefully, pulling at the neck of her gown.

“Probably,” she muttered with equal distaste, envying her sister’s teaching assignment suddenly as the wind started to shift from the dry northern wind to the more humid, eastern one.

“Suddenly I’d much rather be out in the countryside, rather than in this stone jungle.”

~ Lu Ji, Headmaster of the Blue Gate School ~

Lu Ji, headmaster of the Blue Gate School, stood by the window of his ‘office’, staring out at the rain. The season had ended early, it seemed. Ill winds from the east, bringing many changes. The previous blue of the sky was rapidly vanishing and the distant, sparkling sea turning to a green-grey as the trees in the gardens shifted and started to become dappled. Some were already gaining fresh greenery mere minutes after the first raindrops had fallen.

-Do they have nothing better to do than make trouble for others and chase rumours like children after butterflies?

Leaning on the window and staring at the rising tower of the Blue Pavilion, with its strange architecture and gleaming azure and gold roof tiles, he ran through what he knew of the pair sitting on his couch once again in his head.

-Dun Lian Jing, ranked seventeenth among the various princesses of the Imperial Court in terms of her power and influence.

-Huang JiLao, the nephew of Huang Leng, one of the more influential Imperial Advisors. Huang Leng is also the de facto ‘Head’ of the Huang clan’s influence in Eastern Azure and also a close relative of the Empress.

In other circumstances he would have actually been quite happy to see these two, however…

“Well, Headmaster?” Dun Lian Jing asked from where she was seated, sipping her tea.

She certainly had the composure of a princess – tall, pale-skinned, flawless features, but not with the jade-like plasticity that haunted those who had adjusted too much during their Nascent Soul and Immortal breakthroughs. She currently wore a scholarly gown of blue and gold that, despite her and its’ best efforts, failed to conceal that she was frankly well-endowed. Her only open acknowledgement of her Imperial status was the dragon and luan hairpin that held her veil in place.

Her question was directed to the gold and jade seal that was sat on the table more so than its other contents, for all that those were probably more troublesome in the long run.

He eyed the Imperial Seal, bearing the crest of Dun Jian, the youngest brother of the current Emperor in this instance, and tried not to sigh audibly.

“Are you going to refuse Imperial Acknowledgement?” the girl pressed, without any preamble.

‘Refuse Imperial Acknowledgement’, he had to really struggle not to grimace. Refusing Imperial Acknowledgement was considered an act of ‘disrespect’ to the Imperial Seat. All seals belonging to the Emperor's direct family had the person of the Emperor formally associated with them as well. So not only would you be disrespecting the concept of Imperial Power, but also the Emperor… personally.

“And why does Lord Dun wish to annex my school?” he asked after a suitable pause.

“All schools that are under the auspice of the Imperial Seat are affiliated with the Imperial Seat; the Seat cannot annex that which it already possesses a stake in,” the girl said blithely.

-Stake, my ass, he scowled in his head, letting his focus slip just slightly.

The faint flicker of killing intent from the other side of the room made him sigh as the errant thought was caught by the minions skulking in the shadow who were escorting her on behalf of the Provincial Imperial Envoy.

“Show respect to the princess…” the thoughts echoed in his head because he let them.

He deliberately didn’t look at where they were. There was no way he should be able to ‘sense’ let alone ‘see’ those two watchers guarding her with his supposed cultivation. In one respect, it was quite tiring; in another, it was a curious exercise in self-control. Everyone in a world like this maintained a certain façade; it was just vexatious that the current eyes and ears in charge were especially nosey. Even the previous emperor hadn’t been this insecure.

“Your Highness speaks the truth,” he nodded, rolling his eyes inwardly. “Allow this servant to rephrase. Why does Imperial Uncle Dun wish to have you take personal control over the Blue Gate School here and now?”

“So you do know manners,” the girl said with a pleased smile.

“Imperial Teacher has sent us here to investigate this tablet,” she gestured to the grey slate on the table before them with a sweet smile that never reached her eyes. “It is of interest to him, and of importance to the Imperial Court. In this capacity, our Imperial Uncle asks the Blue Gate School to render every service in support of the Imperial Court and its investigations into this artefact. As Teacher Dun’s student, it is, of course, proper that I am the agent in this; however, I will delegate this to JiLao here.”

He put his hands together behind his back and tried not to look at the ceiling. In truth, this moment had been a while coming.

-If only it had not been under my tenure. Why couldn’t it have happened when you ran off over the ocean to join the Imperial Court, father dearest? he thought to himself.

It was a funny fiction really. They were here for the tablet, certainly, but the goal here was pure control in the ongoing battle between the Imperial Court and the Azure Astral Authority over this region. In that context the Blue Gate School was… had been, by and large the last and juiciest independent piece of that pie to cut up.

The Teng School and the Golden Promise School were both long since grasped as puppets for the Third Imperial Prince, Dun Fanshu, and the Third Imperial Princess, Dun Miao, respectively. The Lin School had been the only other holdout, until recent events and some dab intervention by the Imperial Court, via the Astrology Bureau, had ruined them. The reasons for that were still a source of public ridicule for the few survivors that had taken refuge in the rural regions of Yin Eclipse, but privately they had been about the same thing this was – control over the routes into the eastern continent and specifically the wealth that flowed out of the Yin Eclipse Mountains.

The real issue here was the small print of this ‘takeover’ – the ‘every service required’ bit.

“This servant presumes that this other… artefact… you have brought here is related to the ‘service required’?” he asked as self-effacingly as possible.

“The Imperial Teacher understands that the school holds a wealth of knowledge about the time of the Blue Water Sage,” Huang JiLao smoothly interceded. “The histories of the Imperial Court state that several such tablets were found during his time in these lands?”

“We do have certain records from that time, Your Imperial Highness,” he said, respectfully. “Mostly though, they deal with the aftermath. When Blue Water City was founded. That was when the school was set up, after all the unpleasantness had finished.”

Both of them had the good grace to drop the pretence and look a bit shifty. The bloodbath that had followed as everyone else looked to capitalise on his Grand Uncle’s good fortune had caused a widespread disaster both then, and in the millennia after.

“—Do you wish to see them?” he added.

“In due course,” Dun Lian Jing replied, with a tone of voice that made it very clear that Huang JiLao would be doing that.

“We also wish to see the other artefact you have like this,” the Princess said, waving her hand at the grey slate.

He schooled his face really carefully – the school absolutely had no artefact like that.

-Dun Jian, you snake, he sighed in his head.

That would be the Imperial Teacher’s connection to the Pill Sovereign Sect, across the ocean, seeping in. They, as the ‘premier’ influence focused on pill refining, had long had their eye on the Blue Gate School for the alchemy inheritance that was the root of their current prosperity in this region. That desire had not lessened much in the 30,000 years since the school’s founding either.

There was quite a lot of lingering greed towards his Grand Uncle’s trip into the Yin Eclipse Mountains. Dun Jian had barely been a junior back then and while he hadn’t taken part, two of his younger siblings had, both vanishing into the dark below the mountains. The results of those expeditions had been, to put it politely, disastrous. The Yin Eclipse mountain range had as good as eaten the pride of a generation whole and barely spat out any scraps afterwards. The Blue Gate School for the most part owed its origins to that aftermath as the Lu clan sought to build, opportunistically, on his Grand Uncle’s good fortune.

Various rumours had surfaced and died at the time as he vaguely recalled. He was a part of the successor generation to that ill-fated one – so much of it had passed him by. When he was at his peak as a junior, it had been the last series of spats between the Huang and Mo clans rather than Yin Eclipse that exercised everyone.

Ever since then, though, there had been a lingering fear and antipathy among certain quarters in the Imperial Court over Yin Eclipse. However, beyond some meagre and ill-fated attempts at restitution, the eye of the central continent had largely pivoted north and the cold war with the Azure Astral Authority had become the thing that exercised all the major influences ever since.

“Our school has no artefact like that, Your Highness,” he said, bowing in the appropriately apologetic manner.

It was perfectly true – the alchemy canon was on a series of normal jade slips after all. As to the other things, those were nothing to do with the school, the Blue Water Pavilion or even the Lu clan.

“If you wish, given you possess such authority, I can take you both on a personal tour of the school’s vault and storehouse to—”

“—The Blue Water Pavilion,” the princess said, drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair.

“—is not part of our school and never has been,” he pointed out a bit diffidently. “The falling out between my honoured grandfather and the revered Blue Water Sage is a matter of quite a bit of historical commentary…”

-Dun Jian, may your nine generations betray you by every means, he added, really annoyed inside now.

“Teacher Dun—” the princess started.

“Your Highness,” he interjected smoothly, “with the greatest respect to the Imperial Teacher, he has shown precious little interest in this part of the world. It is understandable that some opportunistic people may have provided false testimony and rumour that has made its way across the ocean at some point – there have been a great many convincing tales about that place over the years—”

“You are doubting the word of my teacher?” the girl said, leaning forward and narrowing her eyes. The intensity of the watchers became a bit greater as well.

“—but I swear to you, by the ‘Righteous Heart of the Heavenly Kong’, that the Blue Water Pavilion has no relation to the Blue Gate School,” he said piously, ignoring the flicker of blue chrysanthemums around his hand as he held it up. “Your teacher is undoubtedly a learned and discerning man…”

-For a philandering opportunist and skirt chaser with more skeletons in his closet than he has closets for skeletons!

“—So you are saying that the information relayed to us was one of those unfortunately grand tales that people are prone to spinning and your school does not have one of those slates,” Huang JiLao cut in with a conciliatory tone.

“It is as Young Noble Huang deduces,” he said with an outward smile and an inwards eye roll. “It may be that the root of this is someone within the Azure Astral Authority… looking to set us at odds with each other?”

“And yet this other slate was on its way to you,” Huang JiLao noted. “Along with these…”

He glanced involuntarily at the rest of the contents of a gilded box: two small dark stone pots, a set of cutlery and small carved panel – in stone – of a flower. It was all almost aggressively mundane apart from the qi-repelling properties of the stone most were made from. The last thing on the table was a third slate, much like the others, but completely covered in scroll-work and with a sword on the flat panel that had also been given by that Deng clan youth and had not been part of the goods recovered with the ginseng.

“Only in the sense that most of them were found by happenstance apparently, by a disciple of the school who was working in one of the peripheral regions,” he pointed out, honestly. “All we know of it is that it all turned up in a shipment of yin fire ginseng that was being smuggled out of the province on the black market. We take the issue of smuggling very seriously, as you might expect. As you are aware… we have worked closely with both the Azure Astral Authority and the Imperial Court to ensure that things here run smoothly to the benefit of everyone.”

“As you should,” Huang JiLao nodded, agreeing with him at least on the surface. “Although I feel that the rise in it is mostly down to the Azure Astral Authority of late and people not wanting to see the bounty of their land robbed away to other worlds where it benefits them not a bit.”

“It is,” he agreed, allowing a proper scowl for once, because that was certainly true. “The amount they are drawing away is unsustainable.”

“I understand it has something to do with the Sheng clan on Shan Lai,” Huang JiLao nodded.

“—Anyway, about these ruins,” Dun Lian Jing cut back in, clearly not interested in the politics of herb smuggling.

“It came from a small ruin that was exposed in the Low Valleys by a landslide after unseasonable rain at the end of the last season,” he explained. “A few such ruins have been uncovered after that freak set of storms. None have given up anything—”

“Until now,” she interrupted, not bothering to hide the dry amusement in her tone.

“Until now,” he had to concede. “But they gave up nothing more than a tetrid stalker that went through some villages like a hot knife through butter, a few dangerous mushrooms and a small collection of minor artefacts like these. Pots, plates, some cutlery and a rather ornate stone chest which I believe someone from the Shen clan bought at auction for a staggering amount of spirit stones before it was ‘seized’ by the Military Authority who claimed it was an ancient heirloom of the Sheng clan. That last one is likely why this lot was originally being smuggled out.”

The question of how that set had made its way to these two was more interesting to him, in truth.

The report on the recovery of the items had finally reached Ling Tao a week ago as it turned out, but she had been busy and told one of the elders in charge of school requisitions to go deal with it and see if it was anything that the school needed to be interested in. They had been from the Deng clan.

The fallout of that would be sorted out after this – he had some suspicions there. It had been a young noble from the Deng clan who had handed two of those grey slates to these two as a ‘first greetings’ gift on behalf of their clan to the Imperial Princess almost as soon as they had set foot off the Dragon Ship that brought them here.

He would have kicked the elder in question out, but as it stood now, the man was likely to get a merit and a promotion given the Deng clan was on the up, over the ocean.

“I will certainly give you that this is a highly unusual artefact,” he agreed, casting an appraising eye over it. “It also appears to be very broken.”

He turned back to the window. The rain was, if anything, intensifying. That was rather apt for the day as it was turning out. “We can certainly help you make enquiries regarding other such pieces, but I doubt you will have much more luck than we have had about other oddities and curios over the years. As I said, you are welcome to look at those we do have in the vaults here.”

“Certainly, we shall,” Huang JiLao said in a tone that implied that he would be the one doing that in all likelihood. “However, there is still the matter of these other slates…”

The youth picked up the third slate, the one they had brought with them, and passed it to him directly, as if that would help him recollect something about it. “Imperial Advisor Dun has asked us to come here on his behalf and investigate the origins of this in the first instance. That more such relics should have shown up by this other means is…”

He took that slate, which was somewhere between the other two in quality of damage, and considered it. To call it less ruined was probably overselling it really. It was a ruined remnant – a piece of grey stone a shade bigger than the average martial manual, with a big crack across the bottom of it and a set of floral decorations around the edge.

On the upper part of the middle of it were the words ‘Krista Tonnitrue – Tur’. His Easten was a bit patchy, but that read ‘Thunder Crest – Wa’. Below it was another set of six characters, set out a bit like a constellation map with links and swirls between them. The characters themselves were somewhere between an idiot savant’s idea of a Dao Formation's centre and a Moon Rune.

“It’s either a very badly drawn map of seven fortresses with different signs attached, or a divination formation of some kind,” he said, handing it back.

It did give him a faint sense of ‘guidance’ and ‘directionality’. Two of the symbols also gave him a hint of lingering aspects of ‘control’ while the last hinted at ‘Severance’ or something similar. Below that, was a short, interrupted piece of text in a language that was very like an ancient Easten script that talked about a ‘guidance’ or maybe a ‘passage’?

“That was what Imperial Teacher also concluded,” the princess agreed, with a smile which she was clearly trying to pitch as beautiful, yet oppressive. “What he wishes is for us to investigate the origins of this artefact within the Yin Eclipse Mountains. What we need from you is the cooperation of your school with that endeavour.”

“And those who are now in the school?” he asked, trying not to think about the two elders from the Pill Sovereign Sect, the various strutting lunatics from the Four Peacocks Court and a bunch of others who were turning the place upside down.

“Ah, there are a few trusted associates who have come with us, with the blessing of Imperial Teacher,” the princess said blandly. “I trust it will not be a problem to accommodate them within the school?”

“No… not at all,” he sighed. “It is our honour to support the Imperial Court through your Imperial Uncle in this endeavour.”

Certainly, Dun Jian was after something with that tablet – but it seemed that the major goal, to him at least, was the acquisition of this school. The man was a snake, but he was a meticulous snake, and had connections in many places. Certainly very few of those ‘helpers’ below would be here for these two. In all likelihood many were agents for the growing ‘Associations’ of the central and southern continent who were working hard to supplant the Hunter Bureau and aspects of the Civil Authority Bureau, much as the ‘Imperial’ Astrology Bureau had already largely supplanted the ‘Azure Astral Bureau’.

It was unfortunate, but the Blue Gate School was, principally, the most accessible of the neutral parties in Blue Water City that they could swallow up.

-If only they could have done it when father was still in charge, he lamented for a second time.

The worst part of this was that few would actually lament this. The local politics were already so problematic – between the Hunter Bureau, the noble clans, the Military Authority and the push and pull between the Imperial Court and the Azure Astral Authority’s fight over governance – that stability and prospects was what many craved. If the Imperial Court brought it, in the hands of a princess, with a golden scroll and a promise of Imperial favour, few would look deep enough to wonder, more was the pity.

His own instinct was that this was a prelude towards a proper move on the Eastern Gate – Xah Liji City – by the Imperial Court. The Hunter Bureau was also engaged in a lot of effort to win over the Ruan clan for some reason, to the detriment of their local politics in fact. The rumour that kept spinning back through certain circles there was that the Astral Authority were promising them help tracking down their errant Saintess who had fled their enclaves 150 years prior. What they were asking in return, nobody was sure – but there was an envoy from them in the city at this very moment, sequestered with the head of the Hunter Bureau for the province.

“And what of the other thing?” the princess asked.

He nearly asked what ‘other thing’ she meant, before flicking back through the conversation prior to this in his head and realising she was asking about the origins of the other slate – the one with the sword. The only other place that was known to have markings like that was… difficult. If at all possible he didn’t want these two going there.

-May the pet monkey of the nameless fate bugger the Deng clan sideways for telling them where that was! he thought, before schooling his thoughts.

“It is probably not advisable for you to travel into the interior to investigate in person, Your Highness,” he said instead, putting on his politest tone and most apologetic manner.

“…”

Both looked at him in a way that made him want to put his head in his hands and laugh with sadness.

“That is not what I asked,” the princess said a bit more coolly.

“It is what you intend, though, is it not? Your Highness,” he pointed out belatedly.

This was a far bigger problem in reality. These two and their associates going upriver, towards South Grove Pinnacle and the Inner Valleys – into the caves where the ruins had decorations on them like the sword tablet did and where it had likely originated – was a disaster he would dearly like to avoid.

“You have… heard how dangerous the place this is rumoured to have washed from is?” he said carefully.

“There are local stories, yes,” Huang JiLao frowned. “However, these other relics have been recovered…”

“Yes, however, those are chance excavations on the edges,” he said a bit more pointedly. “This, even if it washed out of the river, likely came from the depths of the forbidden zone. Where the suppression is a significant obstacle and the calibre of threat is…”

“Certainly, there are some very interesting local stories and records regarding it,” Dun Lian Jing said with a half-smile that suggested she didn’t really give much credence to them. “In any case, we are very familiar with the Dragon Pillars – and the Argent Devouring Pit.”

“We are familiar with realm suppression,” Huang JiLao said. “And what it can represent.”

“Certainly more than you, Headmaster Lu,” Dun Lian Jing added archly.

It took effort not to let a muscle twitch in his cheek. Her point was, likely, that as a princess of the Imperial Court she believed she knew more about the heavens than he did. It was a struggle to know where to start. Even the Azure Astral Authority was happy to just sit here and reap benefits from a distance. The Meng clan in ages past had done the same, as had the Tang clan over the aeons as far as he was aware.

They were all more interested in money and influence that came from here, plucked quietly, by expendable hands. The bigger the power that walked in there, the less likely they were to walk out – that was the abiding lesson of history regarding Yin Eclipse. It was much watched, but very few dared mess with it and with only a few exceptions all those who had, had come away with only bloody noses and lingering regrets to show for it.

The unwillingness of these two to give him face or listen to his counsel in this matter was certainly down to a combination of whatever Dun Jian had fed them, their own youthful exuberance and those fate-thrashed exceptions in all likelihood.

The last century and a half had been a procession of little aggressions into that status quo. Brought about by the shifting influences to the north and east, and also by a few other upheavals elsewhere, especially on the Northern Tang continent, where rogue powers were starting to accumulate influence once more in spite of the aggressive efforts of the Imperial Court and their allies.

-Perhaps something like this is inevitable, he thought with another flicker of emotional resignation.

-Dun Jian, you snake, what is your goal here? he pondered again.

Dun Jian had one interest: his own personal power. He had never shown interest in the Imperial infighting and he had eyes beyond this world and made friends widely, in the Kong clan, the Huang clan, and among those others who visited the Imperial Court from further afield…

-Great Grand Aunt would say that it is just a big cycle, shifting around a bit, and that my perspective is…

He winced slightly and glanced out across the gardens towards another pagoda, now almost thoroughly obscured in the pouring rain.

-Fairy Aunt is… is a wonderful person!

“…”

“You also have records here on the events of thirty years ago?” Huang JiLao asked, bringing up the topic he had eventually been fearing would come around.

“There is much about the Three Schools Conflict available wherever you look, Young Noble Huang,” he said blandly.

“Regarding Cao Hongjun’s involvement in events of thirty years ago…” Dun Lian Jing added, a faint edge creeping into her voice.

“I know he was active in the conflict, but I was in personal cultivation at the time, Your Highness,” he shrugged apologetically. “I am aware of certain stories, certainly, but no more than your own sources, I imagine. They all come from the same place after all.”

Three could play at being difficult after all, and that wasn’t a lie either or even a half truth. He had been meditating on his advancement at the time, only to be dragged out later to deal with the mop-up – not that he was going to volunteer that.

“Unfortunately, the Azure Astral Authority was very proactive in obscuring whatever role their influences may have had there,” he added, noting their rather annoyed looks. “If you wish, you could seek out an audience with the Cao household.

“Cao Leyang will certainly have comprehensive records for the latter half of the conflict, given the degree of influence he had in bringing that, and the events of one hundred years ago for that matter, to a close,” he added, sticking the knife in a bit to see if they would flinch.

“…”

“Perhaps you could intercede in that matter, as a favour to Imperial Teacher,” Dun Lian Jing suggested, sending a deliberate eye towards the seal.

“As you command, we shall make enquiries through some unofficial channels,” he said with a salute to her.

-But they won’t answer, not now, not even for me, if I didn’t already know everything they would say.

He could already see the Cao household being about as amenable to requests from the Imperial Court as a cat was to water. Their position with the Azure Astral Authority had been a bit precarious in recent years, but they were staunch loyalists to that old order.

“Shall I also make enquiries regarding the other series of events?” he asked, now deliberately fishing.

“Other series of events?” Dun Lian Jing asked a bit testily.

“The events of one hundred years ago, when the Iron Crown Duke’s heirs led that expeditionary force with a large band of valiant young heroes to attack indigenous rebels across the straits, on the western coast of Yin Eclipse,” he said. Even just saying ‘valiant young heroes’ made him want to spit out the window.

That censure had caused more than enough trouble for all parties, riled up the various local clans, led to a number of deeply awkward revelations about the excesses of certain ‘Young Nobles’ and ‘Heroes’ from the powerful families on the central continent and suddenly made people think that the Azure Astral Authority might not be quite so bad as history kept telling them. Not to mention the status of the original perpetrators and the political tensions it spawned when the perpetrators got off way too lightly. He hadn’t thought about that fate-sold little shit-stain in a long time.

-I hope you are haunted by the grudges of all your victims’ nine generations, he added for good measure, because it was never a bad day to curse those events.

“Oh… uhhh…” Dun Lian Jing looked lost for a moment, which was unusual.

“We are aware of those matters,” Huang JiLao said smoothly, saving his companion’s blushes. “Imperial Advisor Dun told us what he considered to be of consequence. Young Noble Teng Tai also sent us a short communique about those matters by way of a further briefing.”

“…”

Huang JiLao didn’t wince, but he did have the briefest flicker of a reaction that suggested he would have liked to take that admission back.

That likely explained the origins of the slate in Dun Jian’s possession. Likely it was something that had come out of that earlier incident. The Iron Crown Duke, across the straits, was one of the few Imperial Court loyalists on the Northern Tang continent, and thus held a disproportionate amount of influence among those who wanted to expand that influence northwards. His younger generations were all profligate little debtors and their associations with the Jade Gate Court and the Red Sovereign Sect were like a nascent cancer on that region which they lorded over like petty kingdoms.

“You will find few who have any admiration of the younger generations of the Iron Crown Duke’s family,” he said, adopting a tone of more serious counsel. “They were seriously involved in the events of a century ago, and many here feel that the punishment they received was… not fitting the crime.”

“So it has occasionally been alleged,” Huang JiLao said diplomatically.

“Quite a few odd artefacts also came out of the aftermath of that,” he added, “many of which then vanished over the ocean as I recall?”

They didn’t bite on that, sadly. Likely they didn’t know the origins of the slate itself, but if he could sow a few seeds of doubt there, it might not be a bad deed in the long run. Nobody had gotten anywhere by being chummy with Dun Jian as far as he knew.

“Teng Tai also spoke quite informatively about some really unusual ruins? Within the cave systems on the western edge of the Shadow Forest, north-east of West Flower Picking Town…” Dun Lian Jing said, changing the topic innocently.

“Regarding that, I would repeat my earlier counsel, Your Highness,” he said with his best worried expression. Her question did take effort not to scowl over.

At least it pretty much confirmed that Dun Jian was interested in the underworld below Yin Eclipse, and that the roots of this mess were probably with the fallout from the events of one hundred years ago and they, or Dun Jian, were fishing for things about the events of thirty years ago.

He quietly cursed the Astrology Bureau and its three old gargoyles in his head and wondered if the Solitary Slaughter Sept could be interested. They had acted over the Blood Eclipse Cult 150 years ago but had been very quiet since then. Reminding the Iron Crown Duke that his misbegotten sons, while gone, had not been forgotten might not be a bad idea. Without a doubt, the root of this resurgent interest was likely those three, who had slunk off to the Jade Gate Court after those events and all become Inheriting Disciples of various minor elders affiliated with the Kong clan through the influence of their father.

“I have heard some rumours about that, but you would need to go to the Hunter Bureau for anything specific about the depths. Our school had little to no involvement in either event. In any case, most of the ruins have been well-explored over—” he was cut off by Dun Lian Jing finally losing a bit of her patience and standing up, slapping her hands on the table.

“Stop obfuscating, Headmaster!” She stalked over to stand in front of him, scowling at him through her veil. “We know that the Blue Gate School has been hiding information about those ‘treasure realms’ that the Blue Water Sage first spoke of…” she hissed.

“…”

He eyed her in return, cursing those three in his heart even more. Seeing him not react, she stalked back over to the side of the room, looking at the various herbs he was growing for fun in their spatial arrays. The oppression from the two watchers finally became tangible, revealing their strength as Dao Ascendants – beings at the very peak of their Eastern Azure Great Realm. Although not especially powerful ones, likely former Imperial Generals from the time of the previous emperor who had taken up posts as Royal Guards.

“It is in your interest to be cooperative. You still have not ‘accepted’ our Imperial Acknowledgement either.”

“Jing…” Huang JiLao winced and started to speak. “Look, Headmaster…”

“You are being too conciliatory, JiLao,” the Princess remarked as he remained locked where he was by the two intents. “We are already showing this old man this much face, just because his father has a bit of ‘influence’, and yet he is just feeding us back stuff we already know.”

He schooled his face as she directed her words so she thought only Huang JiLao could hear. Her disdainful allusion to his father’s influence left him in no confusion as to her views on it.

Schooling his response as carefully as possible, he offered her a short bow.

Shaking her head, she refused to return it and stalked over to the wall to look at his collection of plants and a few other curios he had acquired over the years.

“Your Highness, the fissures are hardly any great secret,” he said, schooling himself as she picked them up one after another. “As to there being some kind of ‘treasure realm’, I am unsure what the Teng clan’s young heir Teng Tai or the Teng School’s Headmaster Teng Shan have told you… but I can swear to the—”

She banged the table and the shelves rattled. “Headmaster!”

She had presumably done it to make a point, but somehow, several of them fell off – including the one she had just been holding. All but that one bounced. In a blur, he made it halfway across the room.

“You dare–!” the voice of one of the guards hissed in his head, making the space around him congeal slightly.

With a splintering of space, he watched as at the very last second one of his most treasured herbal specimens – a nine thousand year old ‘green soul orchid’ was reduced to crushed stems and broken flowers amid the shards of the array and its glass case. The strength that had done the scattering was the Dao Ascendant that had warned him earlier – because Dun Lian Jing was not strong enough to break that case on her own.

Staring at the ruined plant…

“…”

The princess looked… as surprised as he was, but that didn’t matter now. The point had been made. He resisted the urge to look out the window towards the pavilion. The orchid had had a beautiful singing voice and its little soul flame had liked to dance in the evenings, entertaining him by making funny faces or impersonating people it had seen in the day.

He was properly angry now. It was tempting to throw her into the ocean – and with enough effort he could probably do it. With her life-saving treasures she would survive and it would be a character building experience for the whole city to see her impersonate a meteorite.

It took effort, but he stepped back.

-Refuse to play their game…

-Refuse…

The remains of the little orchid lingered in his field of view. Only his experience of many, many years stopped him in the end. To do that would require fighting the two Dao Ascendant cultivators; killing them was possible, but the repercussions…

-Not worth it… he told himself.

-Dun Jian, you snake, I will find some way to make you scream and weep blood for this, and that vow he fully intended to keep.

She had not intended to break that plant, just bang the wall.

Killing them would cause the kind of repercussion that Dun Jian had likely hoped would occur at some point by sending someone as fiery as this princess here. Huang JiLao was clearly to temper her more problematic edges, but only by a little.

“In any case, please excuse us,” Dun Lian Jing eyed the ruin of the plant – she was clearly trying to pretend that was deliberate now, but he had seen the flicker of shock and faint horror in her eyes when it shattered – and waved for him to leave.

“Of course, Your Highness,” he said with a formal bow, letting none of his anger seep out. The aura of that Dao Ascendant hung like a sharp sword held just behind his neck.

-Another angle to the mess to consider, he thought sourly, walking out of his own office.

-Is someone also trying to plot the princess or the Huang boy as well with this?

-That imperial guard from the Imperial Envoy’s estate just tried to make me lose control, was that so they could step in and ‘deal’ with me?

The door closed behind him without him ever touching it.

“Headmaster,” a school aide, from the Ha clan, based on the subtle purple motifs on his robe, stepped forward and saluted. “Will Her Highness and the Young Noble be needing anything?”

He shot the man a disgusted look that nearly nailed him to the wall and just walked on. Setting aside the amount of bowing and scraping he had just had to fake, he had also been deeply attached to the orchid. It was a gift from his Aunt to help his cultivation, and a token of her esteem for his progress in advancing it and a delightful little being in its own right, wholly undeserving of that fate.

“Headmaster Ji!” a tall old man, a Dao Sovereign wearing robes of the Deng clan, paused to speak to him, the barest flicker of surprise in his eyes.

“Deng Kong,” he said flatly, now thoroughly in no mood to humour others, especially not this old fart with barely a hatful of talent.

“How is Her Highness? We were asked to attend her – to provide certain things.” Deng Kong offered him a slight salute, as one might between equals, which was frankly embarrassing.

“She is as you find her,” he grunted, narrowing his eyes and making the older man take a step back and sweat.

Despite them ostensibly being of the same realm in the eyes of the outside world…

Without comment, he swiped the books from Deng Kong and skimmed them as the man spluttered in shock.

-Teng Tai… that attempt at riling me up… and now this old idiot was surprised to see me.

His thoughts rattled around in his head as he skimmed the books. They were a series of eye-witness accounts from various young masters of the Deng clan regarding the ‘finding’ of the fragment.

-The school’s old ancestor from the Deng clan… he resolved to go have a quiet word with that old fogy.

They emphasised a great deal how useful the Deng clan had been in facilitating those artefacts’ speedy arrival to ‘Her Highness’ and that snake Dun Jian. If he was to bet money, this was at least sixty percent aggrandisement.

“I am sure she will be delighted with these,” he shrugged and tossed them back at the man, walking off and leaving him standing in the hallway.

-So not only one imperial snake trying to bite the heels of this school.

Teng Tai and the Teng clan were one thing, but the Deng clan was nearly as influential as the Ha clan and had links to all three schools. They were especially close to the Third Imperial Crown Prince, Dun Fanshu. They had also been the biggest beneficiary of the Three Schools Conflict and the fall of the Lin School and clan.

-Is Dun Jian also working with that brat Fanshu? That was an unappealing thought. The apparatus of Dun Jian was nothing compared to the issues of meddling with one of the imperial heirs.

Turning the corner, he found himself face to face with the Supreme Elder of the Leng clan and the head of the Mu clan, both also carrying gifts and scrolls and heading in the direction of his office with some haste.

They both opened their mouths to speak to him, then shut them again as he stalked past without so much as a sideways look, letting his aura do the talking.

Arriving in the courtyard at the centre of the school, he surveyed the various disciples going about their daily tasks and sighed. A few saw him and saluted, drawing attention to his presence. Along the far wall were a bunch of people wearing robes of the various influences from the central continent – Pill Sovereign Sect, Four Peacocks Court, Myriad Herb Association and a few other less consequential ones besides. None of them made any effort to salute him as he walked across the edge of the courtyard, despite all of them being juniors.

Lu Ji managed to avoid twitching an eyebrow at that. Soul sense didn’t work in this accursed rain, but the hubbub of conversation told him that there was currently a Pill Dao discussion going on in the alchemy court between Elder Kun Wen and an elder from the Pill Sovereign Sect.

He shook his head in frustration and walked through the gateway out of the central courtyard and into one of the garden courts, summoning an umbrella decorated with waves and a nine-headed blue serpent to shelter him from the rain.

-Perhaps the writing was already on the wall with the Lin School debacle in any case, he thought wearily.

Walking past a statue of his Grand Uncle – Lu Fu Tao, the ‘Blue Water Sage’ – sitting in meditation, he paused and shook his head sadly, thinking back to the old man and how he had put so much effort into setting up this city and securing the prosperity of the province through it in this era. It was really only the old man’s shadow that had kept them independent to this point anyway. A minor miracle of location and reputation… now broken and consigned to history in all likelihood.

“Sorry, old man,” he muttered, standing and staring at the flower beds with the blue and yellow spirit blooms. “It seems that your unfilial descendants really are no better than anyone else’s.”